2.1 Satriya Speaks Indonesian

Satriya described to me that at this point in his life – his fourth year of college – his communication took place largely in Indonesian in most of his daily activities such as talking to his college friends, his girlfriend, the high school English Debate students he coached, and in regular interethnic interactions and academic transactions at UKSW. He claimed that he regularly spoke in English with his ED and Debate Club peers, and he once explained that he would be more likely to speak Indonesian with a cashier at the mall who he knew was Javanese than in a transaction at the market with a Javanese vendor, where he would be more likely to speak in Javanese. With regard to his views about Javanese proficiency, Satriya expressed the value of being able to speak its multiple registers, but he also justified the fact that nobody his age really does speak them – in his experience, adults really didn't mind if he spoke a polite version of ngoko, generally known as the peer-to-peer register of the language, to them.

As he had advanced through schooling, the presence of Indonesian and English increased in his daily life. Indonesian seemed just a language of circumstance for him, garnering, as he described to me, little affective attachment and even a sense of being demeaned for being markedly Javanese when speaking Indonesian. In a conversation one day, he expressed to me that the two forms of language he would be most proud to be able to speak were Javanese kromo, the register of deference, and English. He stated that Indonesian, on the other hand, is there 'just to communicate' (Fieldnotes, 19 October 2009). Despite his stated lesser affection for Indonesian, Satriya spoke it fluently by necessity: by the time we met in 2009, Indonesian was well in place as the common academic, interethnic and mass media language. Indonesian in Indonesia is now a fact of life – it is as 'natural' an idea as the Indonesian nation itself.