Indonesian Who Speaks English: Talking about Language and Identity

Nowadays, everything comes in English. I would say that English really is a dominant language.

Most of people have been learning and teaching English (to their children) from the very young age. Even though they were not coming from native English family or mixed family, they will use English as second or even first language.

Why people start doing that and how come English such a dominant language? It is because of English being used by a large number of speakers. It is estimated 1.5 billion people speaks English. Moreover, English also have an important role because it is being used by international institutions as the main language, such as United Nation. This situation, as of a few researcher labeled it, called 'world Englishes'. For some situation, English also a lingua franca. 

I am not gonna talk more further about it. I am gonna talk about how our response to this situation.

With those situation I have mentioned, people tend to be a English speaker even though it is not their mother tongue. To futher improve the language skills, "modern" family nowadays took their children to the “international” school that uses English as the main language. It is believed that mastering English is the preparation for a better future.

Is that true if we master English, we will have a better future?

It is undeniable that using English will expand your opportunities. You can expand your career, for example, to other parts of the world. That is such a big deal for your life, isn’t it?

But, we come from a multicultural country. Multicultural equal to multilingual. For us, being able to speak other than two languages at the same time is a common situation. You can switch from one language to another in one conversation. Maybe in monolingual country, this situation will be considered as a weird situation. Even sometimes, the ability to speak more than one language, considered as a negative attitude.

And, let's think about it a bit further. Is it wise to use only English in your daily, although you are an Indonesian?

Now the problem expands: what is the exact meaning of Indonesian?

Languages are mostly related to someone's identity. Usually, if you speak Bahasa, you are Indonesian. If you speak Spanish, you are Spanish. So, what about this situation: Indonesian who talking in English? You would say he is British or Indonesian?

This is my point. 

When you talk about languages, you mostly talk about your identity too. Not only about your identity, but also about the community you involved in. Fought says, in the local language ideology, speaking a language makes them members of a particular ethnic group (2005, p. 21). 

I am writing this to talk over my anxiety about how our languages (Bahasa and indigenous languages) life. There are various situations where it seems people more prefer to use English than Bahasa even when those people didn't know the proper grammar, words or metaphors they used. Moreover, they do not know (this could be a literal meaning or just a metaphor) how to speak and use Bahasa properly. So how this situation will bring us to a better future? You neither cannot use English nor Bahasa properly. 

Being able to speak English is a plus one. But at the same time, maintaining the native culture of our own is a great and important thing too.

Now, I am starting to think, would it be possible if there is only one language left around the world?

References

Fought, Carmen. Language and ethnicity

English as a Global Language