Language and Superdiversity: Indonesians Knowledging at Home and Abroad

Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics

by Zane Goebel

Scholars of language ideology have encouraged us to reflect on and explore where social categories come from, how they have been reproduced, and whether and to what extent they are relevant to everyday interactional practices. Taking up on these issues, this book focuses on how ethnicity has been semiotically constructed, valued, and reproduced in Indonesia since Dutch colonial times, and how this category is drawn upon in everyday talk. In doing so, this book also seeks to engage with scholarship on superdiversity while highlighting some points of engagement with work on ideas about community. The book draws upon a broad range of scholarship on Indonesia, recordings of Indonesian television from the mid-1990s onwards, and recordings of the talk of Indonesian students living in Japan.

It is argued that some of the main mechanisms for the reproduction and revaluation of ethnicity and its links with linguistic form include waves of technological innovations that bring people into contact (e.g. changes in transportation infrastructure, introduction of print media, television, radio, the internet, etc.), and the increasing use of one-to-many participation frameworks such as school classrooms and the mass media. In examining the talk of sojourning Indonesians the book goes on to explore how ideologies about ethnicity are used to establish and maintain convivial social relations while in Japan. Maintaining such relationships is not a trivial thing and it is argued that the pursuit of conviviality is an important practice because of its relationship with broader concerns about eking out a living.

294 pages, Hardcover

First published June 11, 2015

About the author

Zane Goebel is a lecturer in Indonesian and Linguistics at La Trobe University in Australia. He has also taught these disciplines at the Northern Territory University and James Cook University. In 2001 he received his Ph.D. in sociolinguistics based on close to three years of fieldwork in Indonesia. His wife Junaeni Goebel is a native speaker of Indonesian. Zane and Junaeni are also the authors of the Pocket Indonesian Dictionary and the Essential Indonesian Phrase Book, both of which are published by Periplus Editions.