Indonesian Language Policy Analysis

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1. Indonesian Educational Language Policy: A Brief History
Indonesia is a linguistically complex country with most Indonesians being bilingual or multilingual, speaking Bahasa Indonesia - the national and official language – plus one or more of the 700 vernacular languages (ICBS, 2010), plus a language with external roots (such as Arabic or English). For example, I speak Bahasa Indonesia, two vernacular languages (Javanese and Madurese), and English, and I am not unusual in doing so.
Swiftkey (2015), the provider of the application to replace keyboard for IOS and Android phones and tables, through a survey about the combinations of languages Swiftkey users used around the world revealed that Indonesia is the country with the highest number …show more content…

During that period of time, nationalism was of a prominent importance for the Indonesian who just gained the independence in 1945. On the contrary, regionalism was considered imperilling the sense of nationalism and therefore had to be restricted. Mother tongue and vernacular languages which were parts of the regionalism was regarded a threat to the national language; meanwhile, Bahasa Indonesia was considered to play an important role to escalate students’ sense of nationalism (Rosidi, 2010). Everything regarding regionalism needed to be eliminated, because Indonesians desired a unified nation (ibid). In further development, in 1975, the government stipulated that the only language of instruction schools of all level and universities had to adopt was Bahasa Indonesia, and that vernacular languages can only be taught as a subject (ibid). Since then, Bahasa Indonesia was used as the language of instruction at the educational institutions for all …show more content…

However, this policy was then reverted in January 2013 after the Constitutional Court declared the ISS law to be unconstitutional. The ruling marked the end of the ISS/EMI era, and despite the major funding and effort (e.g. teacher education) expended during the ten-year life-span of the ISS/EMI innovation, public schools were no longer permitted to use English except in the English classes and had to revert to the use of Bahasa Indonesia as the language of instruction. More discussion about English-medium Instruction and its reversal is presented in section 3 of this

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