Almost Unbridled: Indonesian Youth Language and its Critics

Abstract

Teenlit, a genre of popular literature for adolescents, was introduced to Indonesia around the beginning of the last decade and almost immediately attracted a large readership consisting predominantly of female adolescents. Its rapid rise has invited both favourable and hostile reactions from observers. Sympathetic literary critics view young people's attraction to it as a positive process towards the development of a healthy reading and writing habit. Meanwhile, hostile critics consider it as nothing more than light fiction containing questionable moral values, written in an unacceptable style. This article examines a representative example of such criticisms as a platform for discussing the relationship between the relatively new genre of adolescent literature and the wider context of language change. It seeks to show that hostility towards teenlit reflects a concern for the maintenance of standard Indonesian as the language of literature amid a rapidly changing language situation in which a major colloquial variety of Indonesian has been gaining prominence and encroaching on domains prescriptively associated with the standard variety, such as written literature. The negative reaction is also an assertion of an idealized view of literature, which holds that the function of adolescent fiction is to educate readers on the aesthetic function of language and sound moral values. The author demonstrates that this concern arises against the backdrop of a socio-political climate in which the state, having long exerted control over language use and language development, gradually ceases to be perceived as the sole authority on language. As such, it is an articulation of a desire to safeguard the existence of a linguistic authority.