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November 18, 2014 edition

Jennifer Lindsay*
On October 20 last, Joko Widodo took the oath of office as the seventh president of the Republic of Indonesia. It was a thrilling moment, watched and heard by Indonesians all over the country: here was the first president of Indonesia who had risen to this position from below through a series of direct elections (first mayor, then governor and now president). A man of the people, it was the people who had got him there.
In his Javanese-accented Indonesian, Joko Widodo solemnly stated:
"...saya bersumpah akan memenuhi kewajiban presiden Republik Indonesia...I swear to perform the duties of the president of the Republic of Indonesia..."

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More Word Watch articles in other editions

January 1, 1970 edition

Jennifer Lindsay*
It is October once againlanguage month. The month when Indonesians remember the Youth Pledge of October 28, 1928 when Malay (bahasa Melayu) was adopted as the language of the nation-to-be and renamed Indonesian (bahasa Indonesia).
We can read the Youth Pledge of 1928 declaring Indonesian as the language of unity, but we cannot hear it. What did those young nationalists sound like? Did they speak Indonesian with regional language accents, or Dutch accents, and did they sound very different to one another when they spoke Indonesian? We have no idea. We have very little idea of what Indonesian sounded like back when it was adopted as the language of the nation-to-be.

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September 16, 2014 edition

Jennifer Lindsay*
Indonesia has a new President- and Vice President- elect. One speaks Indonesian with a marked Javanese accent, Central Javanese to be precise. The other speaks with an Eastern Indonesian accentSulawesi, to be precise. The outgoing President and Vice President both speak Indonesian with slight Javanese accents.
Sowhat is a Javanese accent? It is a question of intonationand also a particular way of pronouncing certain consonants, particularly 'd' and 't', with the tongue immediately behind the teeth. It is also heard in the tendency to wipe all diphthongs (so ram not ramai) and in the open 'o' sound. Listen to the way President-elect Joko Widodo pronounces his name, 'Widodo'. The 'o' is pronounced halfway between an 'o' as in 'or' and a' as in 'ah', and the 'd' is right at the front of the mouth. His name is not Indonesian but Javanese, of course, so indeed that is how it should be pronounced, but many Indonesians of Javanese background carry this same pronunciation into Indonesian in general. He does. They also tend to speak Indonesian (formally at least) using a relatively narrow pitch range.

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