Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1 States, Language(s) and Globalization
- 2 Engineering an Imagined Community
- 3 Locating Languages in Time and Space
- 4 Preserving the Nation: The Threat Beyond our Borders
- 5 The State Marches On
- Appendix: KBI Statements Situated within the History of Indonesian Nationalization
- References
- Index
5 - The State Marches On
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 October 2026
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1 States, Language(s) and Globalization
- 2 Engineering an Imagined Community
- 3 Locating Languages in Time and Space
- 4 Preserving the Nation: The Threat Beyond our Borders
- 5 The State Marches On
- Appendix: KBI Statements Situated within the History of Indonesian Nationalization
- References
- Index
Summary
5.1 Endless Efforts to Re-scale
In our semester-final Sociolinguistics paper, Ayu described a future linguistic repertoire that she imagined for herself, as well as what languages Indonesia needs in order to prosper:
Text 5.1 I will still use those three languages in the future
For the conclusion, I will still use those three languages in the future. I will use Indonesian to speak with people from Indonesia, I will use Javanese to speak with people from java, and I will use English to help me earn my living because it is the international language, and this country will develop well if its residents are smart. Using English will enable people to master many subjects in the world, such as tourism, technology, science, and many other fields. So, people will get a good job easily when they are able to communicate. To communicate itself doesn't mean only speak with the local people, but it is more on the communication in the world because from that, people will learn from foreigners directly. It means, they are not only learning by theory, since they directly practice it with those they learn from.
(Ayu, Sociolinguistics Final, 17 December 2009)Hegemonized language ideologies, and infrastructure based on these ideologies, travel throughout institutions of power mostly associated with the state, including – if not primarily – education, and they act complicitly with mass media, internet technologies, and domestic and international corporatization, none of which functions independently from states nor the histories that formed them. Societal discourses of language use and language preference, within these hierarchies and amid idealized models of Indonesianness and of sub-national cultural uniqueness, and which aim to keep the foreign foreign, are not immune to – in fact they are entirely interdependent with – flows and scapes that privilege use of modernized and globalized languages.
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- Statehood, Scale and HierarchyHistory, Language and Identity in Indonesia, pp. 206 - 218Publisher: Multilingual MattersFirst published in: 2026
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