Named speech registers and the inscription of locality in the Dutch East Indies

Abstract

This paper examines the evolution of studies of named speech registers, and especially so-called ‘ritual speech,’ in the Dutch East Indies after the restoration of Dutch rule to the archipelago in 1815. Nearly all of the first non-Javanese grammars in the Indies were of language communities with elaborate systems of ceremonial language. The paper argues that these registers came to fit into Dutch ideologies about writing. These ideologies in turn inflected Dutch studies of the structure of social life more generally, and the role that languages played in local world views and cosmologies.