Abstract
Language and Superdiversity presents a compelling discussion of the changing views of diversity in the Indonesian archipelago, from an earlier geographical anchoring that linked language and ethnicity with place to an institutionalised language mixing in day-to-day talk. The divergence between this mixing and the state’s ideology of ‘unity in diversity’ – a standardised version of Indonesian for use as an everyday medium – is seen in face-to-face talk in Indonesia, as well as in televised productions where language alternation is the norm.
The book is organised in eight chapters and a conclusion. Chapter 2 takes a historical perspective and outlines the major events and technological advances that have indexed language and ethnic social types with cultural value in Indonesia. Since the 19th century, the conditions that enabled and encouraged a rapid exchange of ideas and people also encouraged the creation of language ideologies regarding ethnolinguistic communities. Different governing groups have categorised languages and ethnicities into hierarchical orders, and technology has perpetuated (or challenged) these stereotypes. New waves of technology and schooling practices have allowed people to learn about regional languages and the different social groups who speak them, as well as encouraging the emergence of an uncountable number of locale-specific languages. The increasing exposure to various languages and communities from across the archipelago allows for new commentaries on the other, as well as the competence to comprehend– which Goebel refers to as knowledging– the ability to understand semiotic fragments that are not part of a person’s normal semiotic repertoire.
Goebel investigates this communicative competence through an examination of the discourses and representations of various ethnic groups in Indonesian TV. Chapter 3 reports a multimodal analysis of interactions from 1990s comic soap operas, including an examination of the co-occurrence of embodied language with signs (such as architecture) and situated activity, all of which contribute to reproducing ethnic stereotypes. Goebel argues that these representations helped strengthen indexical links related to ethnic social types and registers. In these soap operas, examples of register alternation were portrayed as commonplace and less stigmatised, depicting a type of diversity that included the ability to comprehend utterances in registers that one could not produce. This language alternation, increasingly presented in these shows, contrasts with the state ideology of unity in diversity.
Following a discussion in Chapter 4 of the social and ethnic conflict that disseminated negative associations with certain identities, Chapters 5 and 6 examine over 400 hours of different genres of Indonesian TV recorded in 2009. Goebel explores habitual and unmarked language alternation, including representations of language and discursive links between ethnicity and place. The language alternation identified earlier had by 2009 become pervasive; across a range of television genres, participants demonstrated knowledging of each other’s semiotic repertories.
Chapter 7 discusses how these TV shows are consumed and understood by Indonesian viewers, particularly those residing abroad in Japan. The attempt to link these TV shows and language ideology formation is ambitious, but Goebel’s methodological approach allows him to examine how Indonesians themselves recognise and evaluate the ethnic stereotypes and discourses about ethnicity through their own emic communicative competence. All participants in the study showed the communicative competence to identify the linguistic signs of different ethnic communities, acquired in prior engagement with one-to-many participation frameworks. Goebel shows that Indonesians abroad manage this superdiversity by practising conviviality through small talk and alternating between multiple semiotic repertoires, which helps build solidarity and common ground between individuals of various backgrounds.
Chapter 8 extends this line of research, investigating how conviviality was produced over longer periods of time by another group of participants. In the long-term social interactions examined over a 2-week period, fleeting conviviality becomes ‘doing togetherness in difference’ (p. 201). Although ethnic conflict has often occurred in Indonesia’s history, the increased movement of people and exchange of ideas throughout the country provides new opportunities for knowledging and doing togetherness. As a result, the social values assigned to ethnic languages have changed, leading to a mixing of ethnic languages with Indonesian, particularly in the speech of those who are not regular users of the ethnic language.
This book provides a thorough discussion of how ethnicity became associated with language and place in Indonesia, and how this association is reproduced in the discourse of Indonesian TV and the speech of Indonesians abroad. TV presents language alternation as the common and unmarked linguistic behaviour, which is then adopted by speakers from diverse backgrounds. In such a superdiverse context as Indonesia, and despite the favouring of Indonesian by official ideologies, speakers can acquire the communicative competence to identify a wide range of ethnic communities of practice and reproduce their linguistic repertories. Goebel’s study thus offers a valuable model for mapping out the emergence of superdiversity in other contexts, and provides a point of comparison for discussing the distinctive ways diversity is understood and reproduced across national contexts. Researchers interested in the relationship between discourse and media technologies such as TV, as well as in the discursive construction of ethnic stereotypes, would find this volume of value.