Frontiers of the lingua franca: Ideologies of the linguistic contact zone in Dutch New Guinea

Abstract

Abstract This essay explores ideologies of the linguistic contact zone in western New Guinea, a region that was once a colonial backwater, but is now the Indonesian province of Papua (formerly Irian Jaya), where a separatist movement is underway. The analysis focuses on the efforts of colonial missionaries to draw firm boundaries between Malay, the Netherlands Indies' lingua franca which later became Indonesian, and the Papuan language known as Mefoorsch. The failure of these efforts reveals the shortcomings of analyses that present ‘heteroglossia’ as a feature of Indies society that Dutch colonials discovered, then mastered by creating standard versions of the archipelago's many languages. Divergent ideologies not unlike those that thwarted previous generations of Protestant reformers confront today's Papuan nationalist leaders, who share a single language of unity with their foes, yet dream of making Papua into a linguistically purified space.

Keywords:

• Language ideologies
• missionization
• colonialism
• nationalism

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the support of a Research and Writing Grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Program for Global Security and Sustainability for the research drawn upon in this essay. I would like to thank Benjamin Zimmer, Deborah Nelson, Judith Farquhar, Jessica Cattelino, Kesha Fikes, David Levin, and three anonymous reviewers, along with Mark Graham and Nils Bubandt of Ethnos, for their generous comments on evolving drafts. Susan Gal's insightful suggestions contributed much to the final version of this essay, and I am indebted to her for her help.

Notes

1. See also van Staden 1998. Irvine and Gal (2000:78–79) argue that although ‘linguistic facts have a certain recalcitrance in the face of ideological construction… there is no “view from nowhere” in representing linguistic differences.’

2. Benjamin 1968 [1923] arguably indicates how translation creates new translingual registers by contributing to the growth of the target language, as well as the work (Susan Gal, personal communication). It is as the outcome of historically situated acts of translation that I am approaching the Netherlands Indies' lingua franca (see Siegel 1997).

3. Britain and Germany divided the eastern half of New Guinea into separate colonies until World War i, when Australia took over the administration of both territories.

4. Malay Bible translations date as far back as the seventeenth century. Portuguese and Dutch, along with Javanese, also appeared as viable languages of conversion and communication. The most authoritative High Malay sources during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century were the Leydekker-Werndly Bible and the Werndly grammar (see Hoffman 1979:72; Blussé 1986:156–171; Maier 1993:45).

5. Schrauwers (2000) has taken Adriani and Kruyt's work in Central Sulawesi as exemplifying the aims and methods of Protestant missionaries throughout the Indies. But cf. Aragon (2000).

6. ‘Just like Latin in the Middle Ages, Malay in the Indies stands in the way of the full development of the life of the soul.’ Still, Kijne concluded that as long as the language taught was the ‘Malay of literature,’ missionaries could use Malay safely for instructional purposes (Utrechtsche Zendingsvereeniging 1926).

7. Another missionary wrote of the need to beat the Muslims to the punch in Papua. The Papuans ‘don't want to remain heathen, but stretch their hands towards something else.’ The Protestant missionaries need to be there to fill the gap (see Kamma 1976:340).

8. Each Noefoosch entry was followed by glosses from Ambonese Malay, islands such as Windessi and Roon, and multiple Biak villages.

9. See Rutherford 1998 on this proposal, which arose as part of a scheme to make New Guinea a colonization site for displaced Indo-Europeans and the Dutch urban poor.