MAINTAINING VERNACULARS TO PROMOTE PEACE AND TOLERANCEIN MULTILINGUAL COMMUNITY IN INDONESIA

Indonesia is a large nation in terms of ethnics, cultures, and vernaculars. Indonesian constitution guarantees that the cultures, vernaculars will be taken care of by the government. Thiss in line with the UNESCO recommendation, to preserve vernaculars as the world culturalheritage. The most important thing is that preserving vernaculars will promote peace andsolidarity in multilingual community. In reality, speakers of many vernaculars in Indonesia aregetting less and less. Sneddon states that this is caused by lingua franca and language shift (2003:203). Areas of higher linguistic diversity like Indonesia always need means of interethniccommunication, i.e. lingua franca. People shift to lingua franca may cause vernacular speakersdecline rapidly, which may cause language decay. The teaching of vernaculars only at the passiveevel, not emphasizing writing and reading will fasten the language decay.Vernaculars will bepreserved if they are respected, used, and inherited to the following generation. Friberg (2011)ates that languages that can be maintained are the ones written and can be read. We should notonly use our national language, but also our vernaculars in order to maintain our regionalanguages. And as people of multilingual community, it is better if we are multilingual. It should beborne in mind that vernaculars reflect local cultures, local values, local identity. The exposure toregional languages will make people familiar with the languages. And as a result, the people willbe familiar with their own cultural values and other people‘s cultural values. Komorowska (2010)aims that understanding others‘ languages will promote understanding and communicationbetween citizens. And this will lead to peace process, to deeper knowledge of other communitiesand their cultures, and in consequence to promote tolerance

Using new literatures as a resource in fostering cross cultural awareness

This paper is based on the premise that the wealth of new literatures in English that are available in several countries of Asia and South East Asia today can serve not only to provide students access to the rich and varied cultural life of the people in these settings, but also help develop in them sensitivity and empathy towards other cultures. Given that English no longer belongs to any one nation or culture, and is increasingly being used in numerous multilingual and multicultural settings worldwide, it is fast becoming ‘re-nationalised’ (McKay 2000), as it takes on new cultural associations, experiences and values. In teaching English as an international language (EIL), therefore, it no longer makes sense to place an exclusive focus on target culture knowledge alone. The paper makes a strong case for including other cultural materials, especially those from Asian and South East Asian literature, in the selection of content and topics for textbooks constructed for use in EFL/ESL contexts, with a particular focus on fostering cross-cultural tolerance and understanding, a neglected area in ELT. Further, the paper goes on to illustrate how texts from these new literatures may be used in promoting cross-cultural understanding in the language classroom. Only recently has cross–cultural understanding begun to receive the kind of attention it deserves in the realm of EFL and ESL teaching/learning. Indeed, for a long time culture itself was considered peripheral, or at best, no more than a supplementary diversion (Tseng, 2002) to the teaching and learning of language, although cross-cultural variation has continued to be a live and productive topic of study in sociolinguistic and pragmatic research. Even where cultural aspects of language study have been addressed in EFL/ESL, traditionally this has pertained exclusively to target language culture. Given the insight that language and culture are inseparable, and that therefore, to teach language is to teach culture,the belief prevailed that in order to gain full competence in the language learners of English in different parts of the world need to internalize the cultural norms of native speakers of English – that is, speakers of English from the Inner Circle (Kachru, 1989) or BANA (namely, British, Australasian and North American) countries (Holliday, 1994)

Can majority support save an endangered language? A case study of language attitudes in Guernsey

Many studies of minority language revitalisation focus on the attitudes and perceptions of minorities, but not on those of majority group members. This paper discusses the implications of these issues, and presents research into majority andf minority attitudes towards the endangered indigenous vernacular of Guernsey, Channel Islands. The research used a multi-method approach (questionnaire and interview) to obtain attitudinal data from a representative sample of the population that included politicians and civil servants (209 participants). The findings suggested a shift in language ideology away from the post-second world war ‘culture of modernisation’ and monolingual ideal, towards recognition of the value of a bi/trilingual linguistic heritage. Public opinion in Guernsey now seems to support the maintenance of the indigenous language variety, which has led to a degree of official support. The paper then discusses to what extent this ‘attitude shift’ is reflected in linguistic behaviour and in concrete language planning measures

Advertising slogans as a problem of translation

Статья посвящена исследованию одной из основных проблем перевода рекламных текстов, которая заключается в содержательном соотношении текста оригинала и текста перевода. В статье рассмотрены стратегии перевода английских и немецких рекламных слоганов, проведен сравнительный анализ слоганов на двух языках

Europe: So Many Languages, So Many Cultures

The number of different languages in Europe by far exceeds the number of countries. All European countries have national languages, and in nearly all of them there are minority languages as well, whereas all major languages have dialects. National borders rarely coincide with linguistic borders, but the latter (including dialect borders) mark by their nature also more or less distinct cultural areas. This paper presents a survey of the different language families represented in Europe: Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, and the four Caucasian language families, each with their sub-branches and individual languages. Some information is given on characteristic structural phenomena and on the status and history of these languages or language families and on some of their extinct predecessors. The paper ends with a short discussion on the language policy and practices of the institutions of the European Union. Europe lacks a language with the status and power comparable to Indonesian in Indonesia. The policy is therefore based on equal status of all national languages and on respect for all languages, including national minority ones. The practice, however, is unavoidably practical: “the more languages, the more English”

Abstracts from the Nineteenth Annual Conference National Association for Ethnic Studies. Inc. Ethnic Studies for the Twenty-first Century

With the leadership of James H. Williams, Tengemana Thumbutu, and the staff of the College of Arts at California State Polytechnic University, NAES had one of its best-attended conferences ever. Participants enjoyed the sunny and smog-free skies of spring in California and the amenities of the Kellogg West Conference Center while renewing their commitment to the need to study and implement current research in ethnic studies

LET’S “HAVE A LISTEN” TO A RADIO TALK

This paper deals with a traditional program in the radio broadcast in Semarang. It analyzes a short piece of radio talks, which contains Javanese knowledge performed by the radio announcers in Indonesian. The traditional values, used to be reflected in Javanese, are now presented in the modern and national language of the country. The sociocultural issues in the program will be analysed in line with sociolinguistic and ethnographic approaches

LOCAL WISDOM IN JAVANESE PROVERBS (A COGNITIVE LINGUISTIC APPROACH)

Proverbs are expressions representing views and values in creating harmonious and successful life. This paper is to investigate the local wisdom in Javanese proverbs. Nonparticipant observation method with note-taking technique is used to collect the data. To analyze the data, I used distributional, identity, and inferencial methods. From the analysis, I found that there are some values among other things related with the Javanese views on social and cultural diversity, self control and management in individual, social, and spiritual life. There are four levels of meaning the proverbs convey, i.e literal, cognitive, literary, and cultural, since they represent concepts for conceptualizing. The concepts are related with nature, body organ, building, motion, space, visual experience, habit, cosmology, number, family relationship, country, God, container, shape. This implies that language in this case Javanese proverbs can preserve human’s experiences and habits that may lose in another decade due to social dynamicity and natural changes. The loss may happen along with the loss of the language. Therefore, there must be some efforts to preserve the language upholding them

SEMANTIC SHIFT ON MALAY WORDS IN CLASSICAL MALAY TEXT HIKAYAT HANG TUAH COMPARE TO MODERN MALAY ( TO CULTURAL CONTEXT

Language—like many other aspects of life—changes over time. All living languages will experience changes. The slightest indication of language change can be seen in older and younger generation. The earlier generation of language user might speak differently from the younger generation and vice versa. Because language contains form and meaning, the changes are not only limited to the form, but also to the meaning. Indonesian language, as a living language, has its periodical changes and one of them is Classical Malay. Hikayat Hang Tuah is one of the most well-known classical Malay texts. Due to language change, there are some differences in Malay language written in Hikayat Hang Tuah and Modern Malay Based on the previous explanation, it is intriguing to analyze the semantic shift in words written in Hikayat Hang Tuah compare to Indonesian Language. However, there are multi-factors triggering the change of language, including culture. Therefore, this paper will not only describe the semantic shift on Malay words in Hikayat Hang Tuah, but also the cultural context affecting the change