Jakarta - The year was 1928 when young nationalists declared the Youth Pledge, which included a call for a national language, Bahasa Indonesia.
Today‘s youth in Jakarta are creating their own language, and the slang being invented by the young people in the melting pot that is the country‘s capital is increasingly making it out to the rest of the nation, spread through TV, radio broadcasts, teen literature and youth magazines.
Young people use the Betawi words gue (meaning I) and lo (you) among themselves, and the formal saya when they want to create some distance with their interlocutor.
In addition to Betawi words, youth are also quick to borrow English terms and use them when talking to their peers.
Indonesians first heard the term bahasa gaul, which means slang, when it was coined by actress Debby Sahertian in 1999 with her dictionary, Kamus Bahasa Gaul.
Debby said she borrowed many of the slang words for her book from the transsexual community, which she spent a lot of time with.
"Later on, I used those words to talk with fellow actresses about things that were confidential," she said.
"Perhaps because many celebrities spoke that lingo expressively, people became interested in learning the language."
Debby says every community has its own lingo, like the police, for example, so non-members can not understand their conversations.
Well-known poet Sapardi Djoko Damono, who teaches literature at the School of Letters at University of Indonesia, said youth had their own language, which, to them, is more familiar, vocal and expressive.
"A language has its own character. People use a lingo based on the place where they exist," he said.
Eko Endarmoko, who wrote the first-ever Indonesian thesaurus, shares this opinion.
"When using a language, we have to see the situation first. We use a different parlance in school than in the coffee shop, for example.
"Our language is bound by the user and the place where it‘s spoken," he said.
The process of adopting English terms into the Indonesian language, said Sapardi, is part of a continually evolving cultural process.
While the language being spoken by younger people does have an effect on the Indonesian language, Eko says this is not a cause for concern.
"Well, you don‘t need strict rules to speak a language. Just go with the flow," he said.
Sapardi said youth lingo would not damage Indonesian.
"On the contrary, it might develop our language," he said.
"A language will only cease if the nation perishes."
Once a trendsetter now follower
In the 1980s, radio station Prambors FM popularized a number of new words, including cing, which can be translated as "dude". The station, established in 1970, had a heavy influence on its young listeners of that era.
Today, however, Prambors is no longer in the business of coining popular terms, said Nia Soemardi, who is in charge of programming and production at the station.
"Back in the 1980s we introduced some popular words, but now our announcers choose to use already-popular terms," she said.
The station‘s be-known announcers, Dagink and Desta, said they did not speak bahasa gaul because it originated from a community they weren‘t involved with.
"The lingo isn‘t the kind of language we use in our community," said Desta, who has been an announcer at the station since 2001.
Dagink, who has worked at Prambors for nine years, said the pair tried to keep up with today‘s youth and their slang. "But it‘s not our job to popularize it as we have a variety of listeners."
Source: www.thejakartapost.com (30 Oktober 2007)
