Slogans

Jennifer Lindsay*

The use of acronyms in Indonesian exploded in the late 1950s when the language was hijacked by politics. President Sukarno, who mesmerized crowds with his oratory, increasingly spoke in slogans. Political concepts were packaged in acronyms, piled one on top of another, and regurgitated in the media, songs, schools and speeches. In 1957, Sukarno announced his plans for Guided Democracy, and from then on authoritarianism increased steadily, including linguistic authoritarianism. The late 1950s and early 1960s were an era not only of Sukarno's official Guided Democracy and Guided Economy, but also guided thinking through guided language.

The English word 'slogan' comes from the Gaelic, meaning a battle cry or yell. So it was with the Indonesian slogans of this time. The slogans were a way to maintain the fervor of revolution and to distract people from disastrous economic realities. This was the era of the Cold War when belligerent slogans and counter-slogans reigned internationally, but Indonesia must surely take the prize for creating the thickest pea soup of acronymic jargon. Read today, political speeches and media of the time are barely comprehensible. The Indonesian language, undergoing rapid change at a time when the republic was young, was particularly susceptible to this kind of political intervention. The acronymic frenzy was an unfortunate aspect of the enthusiasm for modernizing language.