Shifting Languages: Interaction and Identity in Javanese Indonesia (review)

Joseph Errington wrote this book with two major audiences in mind: area specialists and anthropological linguists. He contrasts Javanese and Indonesian based on an approach that draws on recent work at the juncture of human geography and critical theory. This approach is both a strength and a weakness of this book. On the one hand, it allows E to consider each language as institutionally and ideologically bound up with distinct strategies of influence or control; on the other hand, this very theoretical concept is always a little detached from the actual data presented and is therefore not always as convincing as the author would like it to be.

The book is divided into eleven chapters. After an introduction and discussion of the special situation of Indonesian as an ‘unnative’ language in Ch. 1, Chs. 2–5 give an overview of Javanese and Indonesian as linguistic grounds in which social changes are manifested. The chapter topics of this first part include a description of rural and urban life in south-central Java; a historical overview of the development of Indonesian; and a discussion of speech styles, social hierarchy, and community. E further discusses the national language in relation to national development and public language and authority. He sketches Javanese and Indonesian relative to shifting landscapes and senses of community, authority, territoriality, and ethnic and national hierarchy: Javanese as ‘a symbol of the prenational exemplary center, and Indonesian as an instrument of the power and ideology of the nation-state’ (34). The result of these shifts is socially motivated language change.

Chs. 6–10 deal with the politics and culture of bilingualism in south-central Java. Chapter topics include changes in kinship terms, interactional and referential identities, language contact and language mixing, speech modeling, shifting styles and modeling thoughts, and Javanese-Indonesian codeswitching. E describes talk as social praxis that is structurally shaped in interaction and informed by the shifting senses of the languages’ broader values. A final chapter summarizes the conclusions of the book.

This is a useful book. Although its discussion is rather dense and not always easy to follow, examples of spontaneous language or even anecdotal evidence give the reader a good idea of the language situation in south-central Java. The book makes available an excellent discussion of theoretical aspects of institutional and interactional dimensions of language use. E attempts to relate ‘macro’ social forces to ‘micro’ social processes of everyday life including language use; however, his data are not always sufficient to answer the questions he poses or to support the claims he makes when it comes to discussing these links. The kind of data E presents always keeps the reader wondering and craving more information, especially about the informants and their own thoughts and attitudes about language and language use. Nonetheless, each part of the book can stand on its own and is a useful and thought-provoking description and discussion of the dynamics of social and linguistic change.