Linguistics Special Lecture Series 2023 No.3

Jérôme Samuel
Director
Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia

20 April 2023 | Thursday | 10:00 AM Philippine Time (UTC+08:00)
Venue: Palma Hall 1315

LIMITED SLOTS

This installment of LSLS is going to be held in person and will be open to pre-registered participants only. To register, please go to this link: bit.ly/LSLS3Reg. The form will be open until 18 April 2023. For more information, email us at linguistics.upd@up.edu.ph.

ABSTRACT
During the first five decades of the Republic of Indonesia (1945-2000), regional languages were the object of a benevolent disinterest of politicians, their emphasis being placed on the national language (Indonesian), while the speakers of the formers, increasingly exposed to the latter, slipped slowly into an asymmetrical bilingualism, a form of diglossia, where most regional languages seemed doomed to a distant but inevitable erosion. The early 2000s saw the emergence of a concern about the future of regional languages, linked to their attrition as much as to the evolution of center-periphery relations, and a form of tension about the definition of local and regional identities. Through the evolution of the legislative and regulatory apparatus over the last 20 years as well as the debates in the national and regional press in Indonesia, this paper examines the place and functions that seem to be assigned to these languages from now on: more and more identity-based and less and less linguistic nor communicative. The hypothesis I put forward is that we are witnessing the preliminary stage towards the heritagisation of these languages associated with a politicisation of their function in regional contexts, and that these phenomena are made possible if not provoked by their decline, one characteristics of the current processes being, paradoxically, an increased display of these languages in the public sphere.

BIONOTE
Jérôme SAMUEL is a full professor (INALCO, Indonesian and Malaysian studies), currently director of IRASEC and associate researcher at CASE. He is also chief editor of the journal Archipel, Études interdisciplinaires sur le monde insulindien. His work focuses on Malay (terminologies, language policies, didactics, interdialectal mutual intelligibility) and, in a completely different field, on reverse glass painting in Indonesia. (from the website: https://irasec.com/SAMUEL-2333?lang=en)