Indonesian Touted As International Language, Again

Jakarta - Despite being relatively easy to learn, the Indonesian language could only become an international language if its speakers had strong political and economic influences in the world, an expert said on Monday.

M. Umar Muslim, a lecturer on the Indonesian language at the University of Indonesia, said that the appeal of learning a foreign language was rooted in the economic influence that its speakers had, citing Chinese and Japanese as examples, not because a language has simple grammatical structures.

“Even if those languages are difficult, a lot of people think that they need to learn the language because Chinese, Japanese or even Koreans have influential economic powers,” Umar said, citing the domination of English as the most widely spoken international language because its speakers were some of the most influential people in the world.

State news agency Antara reported on Saturday that Minister of National Education Bambang Sudibyo, speaking in Bandar Lampung, Lampung Province, said that Indonesia had the opportunity to become an international language with its simple grammatical and pronunciation systems and due to the shift of power from the West to the East, including Indonesia.

“The power shift can be perceived in the ongoing global crisis with its epicenter in the United States, while Indonesia’s economic development continues to rise,” Bambang was quoted as saying, adding that in the next 50 years Indonesia was predicted to be one of the world’s top 10 economic powers.

The head of the ministry’s Indonesian Language Center, Dendy Sugono, said that there were some factors that could contribute to Indonesian becoming an international language, other than its grammatical simplicity as already mentioned by the minister, namely being the language with the fourth highest number of speakers, including some 225 million native speakers and those who have adopted Indonesian as a second language.

“Another factor is the Roman alphabet, which makes it easier to learn compared to Chinese or Japanese,” Dendy said.

“There are now at least 67 countries in the world that have Indonesian language and cultural studies program in their universities,” Dendy said, adding that the largest number of Indonesian learners now are concentrated in Australia, Japan, China and Korea.

He said that Indonesian was easy to learn because the language itself has adapted many words from foreign languages for science and technology terminologies, 65 percent of which were taken from English.

Dendy said that ministry officials were cooperating with Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt, to open an Indonesian studies program, and there have also been talks to open a similar program at a university in Azerbaijan.

“The rising number of Indonesian migrant workers in various countries could help to spread the use of the language in other countries,” Dendy said.

The Language Center indicated that Indonesia has 473 different languages, 206 of which are spoken in the provinces of Papua and West Papua. Ismira Lutfia

Source: TheJakartaGlobe.com (March 9^th, 2009)
Photo: DigitalPodcast.com

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