In south-central Java, Indonesian is a national but un-native language. It lacks self-evident politically or culturally salient attachments to a primordial, native-speaking community.1 That very un-nativeness has been key to the success of Indonesian language development, a state-fostered drive to “reduce arbitrary social and linguistic heterogeneity through the fast growth of functional heterogeneity within a single language” (Neustepny 1974:37). That same success licenses visions of incipient language shift like Someya's, quoted in the introduction.

But such programmatic, state-centered evaluations do not speak to the ways that the larger project of development might shape perceptions and uses of Indonesian by its un-native speakers; nor do they consider Indonesian's role as a positive and not just an un-native factor in the growth of an Indonesian national identity. To speak to these questions, and redress these gaps, I sketch here Indonesian's sociohistorical grounds, and consider its potential as a symbolic resource for modernist, nationalist ideology. Because Indonesian's values have derived from its groundings first in a colonial and now in a national state apparatus, I consider first its historical place in each as a “nexus of practice and institutional structure” (Abrams 1988:58).

To consider nationalism and developmentalism as facts which might shape understandings of that language in use, I then recruit the selfstyled “philosopher of industrialization,” Ernest Gellner (1964:72). His abstract, theory-driven account of language, modernity, and nationalism helps here to explicate the New Order's self-legitimizing developmentalism, and to locate Indonesian in that project.