Language, Migration, and Identity: Neighborhood Talk in Indonesia (review)

Zane Goebel’s book is a carefully crafted examination of how talk mediates social relations in the context of ethnic diversity. The study is set in two urban neighborhood wards in the industrial city of Semarang, which is situated on the north coast of Central Java, Indonesia, an archipelagic nation renowned for its ethnic and linguistic diversity. Though the two wards that are the focus of Goebel’s work differ on a number of measures (their physical organization and layout, the socioeconomic status and gender composition of their inhabitants, and the stability of their populations), both are ethnically heterogeneous with a majority of Javanese residents, a significant presence of ethnic migrants from other regions of Indonesia, and a Chinese minority. Goebel’s study focuses on patterns of interethnic relations as performed through language, identifying the various factors that contribute to or work against sustained contact among members in each of the two wards. The author painstakingly traces how newcomers and long-time residents in these two neighborhoods adjusted to one another over an extended period (1996–98) via the processes of enregisterment of semiotic registers. A semiotic register is a category comprised of both linguistic and nonlinguistic signs (personas, affective stances, place, space, and so on) that become linked to one another such that the use of one sign in the category implicates the semiotic register to which it belongs. Semiotic registers, Goebel argues, are “always emergent” in the sense that they are constantly evolving in the context of repeated semiotic encounters through which they are produced, negotiated, ratified, or rejected (p. 13). The processes involved are those of enregisterment, “whereby diverse behavioral signs (whether linguistic, nonlinguistic, or both) are functionally reanalyzed as cultural models of action, as behaviors capable of indexing stereotypic characteristics of incumbents of particular interactional roles, and of relations among them” (p. 14, citing Agha 2007:55).

Goebel begins his work by sketching out several semiotic registers that are widely in play throughout Indonesia; these are semiotic registers that have been historically established and institutionally authorized by the Indonesian state through schooling, the media, and government policies. The components of the first register include such things as Indonesian (the national language), objectivity, development, and education. A second register includes languages other than Indonesian, region, intimacy, and ethnicity (p. 19). A third semiotic register with long historical and political roots is associated with Chineseness; its components include trade and commerce, economic advantage, and foreignness. Goebel emphasizes that semiotic registers are never stable; their constituent signs vary from speech event to speech event depending on the degree to which speech participants are willing to identify with and use these registers as well as how they are received. The competence to perform and comprehend a given semiotic register varies depending on an individual’s “trajectory of socialization”; that is, their history of participation in different fields or social settings that involve specific social roles and activities (p. 42). Nonetheless, these semiotic registers have some perduring qualities, expressed and reinforced in part through language ideologies. Indonesian, for example, is widely identified as the language of wider communication between those who are ethnically different, and languages other than Indonesian are assumed to be the appropriate registers for intraethnic interactions.

Despite the perduring qualities of these dominant semiotic registers, Goebel discovers a more complex linguistic pattern in play in the two wards he studies. He finds that rather than relying on the use of the national language in interethnic interactions, some ward members instead engage in a process of adequation, whereby non-Javanese identify themselves as community members who share community values by developing proficiency in ngoko, the informal variety of Javanese. What is more, he discovers little evidence of the asymmetric Javanese exchanges exemplified in school texts whereby older and higher status Javanese are depicted speaking ngoko to younger, lower status individuals who respond in more formal, kromo Javanese. Instead, the Javanese exchanges he documents are overwhelmingly symmetrical in form.

Goebel attempts to...