Heteroglossia

To build linguistic demarcations in Indonesia is to build walls with illusions. At the very least, such demarcation is fragile.

Goenawan Mohamad

February 7, 2022

THESE days, in almost all of our airports in Indonesia, we hear announcements in regional languages. I do not know what this is meant to achieve, and there are unanswered questions: at the Surabaya airport, why do they not use the Osing language, and at Semarang, why not the language of Tegal? And do the people of Yogya really understand high Javanese of the flowery style used for weddings? What is wrong with using our national language, whi

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