The Semiotic Functions of English in Indonesia

Abstract

Under the modernist notion of distinct and separate languages, where speakers can have varying levels of fluency in a language, and the language is deployed or not at certain times (cf. Gargesh R. South Asian Englishes. In Kachru B, Kachru Y, Nelson CL (eds) The handbook of world Englishes. Wiley Blackwell, New York, pp 90–113, 2006; Kachru B. Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: the English language in the Outer Circle. In Quirk R, Widdowson HG, Cantú Y (eds) English in the world: teaching and learning the language and literatures (pp. 11–30). Cambridge University Press, New York, pp 11–30, 1985; Srivastava RN. Applied linguistics. Studies in language and linguistics, vol 4. Kalinga Publications, Delhi, 1994), we gain only a partial picture of how English manifests itself and what influence it has in local economies or ecologies. When we instead treat ‘English’, or any ‘language’ as an ideological object of commentary and as a semiotic resource deployed at different times for different purposes, without its producer needing ‘complete fluency’ in order to successfully communicate meaning, then we get a more nuanced image of the myriad ways in which ‘a language’ can appear in a given context, the ways in which it can be talked about, objectified, and commodified, and the greater socio-historical facts and tensions that circulate around the concept of the language and the semiotic forms associated with it (cf. Agha 2007; Zentz L. Statehood, scale and hierarchy: language, history and identity in Indonesia. Multilingual Matters, Bristol, 2017). In this chapter, I assess the presence and use of forms of English in Central Java, Indonesia. English has been legislated about since quite early after the nation’s founding. Despite language planners’ desire to keep English foreign to ideologies of ‘Indonesianness’, however, the language has seeped into society in various ways, and with increasing popularity and variance in signification. I list three ways in which semiotic devices that signal ‘English’ to message recipients appear locally, juxtaposing legislation about English ‘the language’, with data demonstrating the myriad uses and indexicalities that actually exist on the ground.