Words in Motion: Language and Discourse in Post-New Order Indonesia KEITH FOULCHER, MIKIHIRO MORIYAMA, and MANNEKE BUDIMAN, eds. Singapore: NUS Press and Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2012, xi+312p.

Abstract

Words in Motion: Language and Discourse in Order Indonesia KEITH FOULCHER, MIKIHIRO MORIYAMA, and MANNEKE BUDIMAN, eds. Singapore: NUS Press and Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Studies, 2012, xi+312p.This book is the outcome of a long cooperation between Australian, Japanese, and Indonesian scholars in the field of Indonesian language and discourse. Previously, books in Japanese (Moriyama and Shiohara 2009) and Indonesian (Moriyama and Budiman 2010) had already been published by the same editors. Some of the chapters in this current English-language edition are revised trans- lations of the earlier volumes.The book is divided into 12 chapters and a very interesting Introduction by Keith Foulcher, on Fluid Transitions in an Era of Reform. As one of the most accomplished scholars in the field of Indonesian literary and textual studies, Keith Foulcher situates in this chapter the actual con- tributions to this volume within the greater context of the drastic shifts in Indonesian intellectual discourse since 1998. It was not only new domestic freedom of expression after the downfall of President Suharto, but also Indonesia's now much more intense exposure to the global flow of information that Foulcher identifies as the main reasons for the fundamental shifts. As if the editors wanted to illustrate the drastic changes that took place with the reformasi movement in 1997 and 1998, interestingly, the slot of the very first chapter is then given to Untung Yuwono's contribution on Swear-Words in Contemporary Indonesian Youth Slang. The examples and the discussion in the chapter illustrate aptly some of the atmosphere of the grassroots movement that the reformasi once was. Manneke Budiman's analysis of Foreign Languages and Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Indonesian Fiction builds more on the second theme developed in Foulcher's Introduction: the wide range of international impulses before and after 1998. This topic is dealt with implicitly also in George Quinn's highly informative chapter on Post-New Order Develop- ments in Javanese Language and Literature. At the same time, Budiman's and Quinn's chapters are the only ones in this volume that deal with literature.As the book is not divided into parts or sections, readers might find the reasons for the exact sequence of the chapters not very clear: after the chapter on swear-words come two contributions on literature, then a number of case-studies on regional languages (Sundanese, Eastern Indonesia, North Sulawesi, Bali), then two contributions on the role of Chinese in post-New Order Indonesia. The final two chapters deal with media rhetorics (referring to the President in Indonesian media) and the politics of language standardization in Indonesia. Here, the editors could have helped the readers a bit by structuring the volume more clearly.Having said this, the interested reader will find the high quality of most contributions in this book very helpful. This is, for instance, particularly visible in the seven contributions by Japanese scholars on regional languages in Indonesia, which follow Quinn's chapter on Javanese language and literature. …