December 23, 2014 edition

Jennifer Lindsay*
My first grandchild was born a few weeks ago. I just wrote that opening sentence without showing gender. I used the word 'grandchild', but in English it is impossible to go very far without revealing gender. We have to say 'he or she'.
Our gender is marked immediately upon birth. At the hospital, the first identifying feature of my grandchild was 'female'. Before any name: 'female of' was written on the band on her ankle, and then her mother's name.

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More Word Watch articles in other editions

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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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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