![]() mainly those who reside within the vicinity of Jakarta), over 200 million people regularly make use of the national language - some with varying degrees of proficiency. Whilst Indonesian is spoken as a mother tongue (first language) by only a small proportion of Indonesia's large population (i.e. Though the piece alludes to other languages in Indonesia, such as Javanese, it does not emphasize the fact that the widespread knowledge of Bahasa Indonesian was the outcome of a top-down project of nation-building, and that that language is the native tongue of only a minority of the citizens of Indonesia! From Wikipedia : ![]() Because these children have a weak command of Indonesian some authorities are fearing for the cohesion of the Indonesian nation. ![]() Basically, upper and upper middle class Indonesians are switching from Bahasa Indonesian to English to give their children a leg up, and are sending their children to English-medium schools. It is dense with the different strands of this story. ![]() The New York Times has an interesting piece, As English Spreads, Indonesians Fear for Their Language. ![]()
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