J. Joseph Errington,Shifting languages: Interaction and identity in Javanese Indonesian. (Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language, 19.) Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xii, 216.

Abstract

Although Indonesia's New Order has been thrown into disorder recently, its project of engineering an Indonesian language has been deemed a miraculous success. At Indonesian independence in 1945, the artificial administrative Malay language – used by the Dutch to administer their East Indies colonial empire – was just one of several dialects of a language spoken natively by only a few million residents of the territory. Now its descendant, Indonesian, is a “fully viable, universally acknowledged national language … clearly ascendant over hundreds of languages spoken natively among more than two hundred million Indonesians” (p. 2). Errington, author of two earlier books on Javanese, here turns his attention to that modernist state project of building Indonesian, and to evolving patterns of bilingualism among the Javanese, the demographically and politically dominant ethnic community of Indonesia. He gives us not only a detailed analysis of language use, but also a fascinating ethnographic account of Indonesian national development as it is interactionally constituted in two aptly chosen villages in the region around Solo (Surakarta). This study exemplifies an ethnographically grounded, culturally nuanced approach to bilingualism and language change.