The modernity of Indonesian does not lie in the mere fact of being a marked linguistic alternative to some "prior" language, nor even in being an object of metalinguistic awareness and ideology. After all, plurilingual societies have always involved movement among linguistic varieties. This movement can be habitual and unconscious but also subject to highly self-aware actions and forms of linguistic self-objectification (Voloshinov 1973 [1930], see Lucy 1993). The ubiquity of taboo and avoidance vocabularies, respect registers, ritual speech forms, secretive jargons and so forth shows the ubiquity of a capacity to step into a language perceived as markedly apart from ordinary speech. Marked linguistic varieties can be highly productive, drawing on speakers’ metalinguistic awareness to create new forms, commonly by putting the materiality of signifiers in the foreground, as in punning, acronyms, and so forth.

Crossroads like the Indonesian archipelago have long been swept by linguistic currents and even the relatively hegemonic monologism of precolonial central Java was permeated with words and phrases of Arabic, remnants of scriptural Sanskrit, Malay, and perhaps bits of Hokkien. With these resources to draw on, the region is well known for certain highly elaborated register differences. "Internal translation" (Zurbuchen 1989) is the hallmark of traditional Javanese and Balinese performance, in which archaic languages steeped in Sanskritic vocabulary alternate with commentaries in contemporary idioms that permit audiences to follow the action. Central Java is especially famous for its elaborate register differences by which minute distinctions of social hierarchy are marked by lexical choices among the vocabulary sets of "high," "middle" and "low" Javanese. One register forms the unmarked category, often conceptualized as the speech of casual relations and intimacy figured as that between mother and child (Siegel 1986). Against it, the marked category is the speech of seriousness, formality, adulthood and, often, maleness. It is this analogy of Indonesian to other such forms of register-shifting, especially in Javanese, that has stimulated some of the most insightful contemporary interpretations of the national language. Benedict Anderson (1990a [1966]; see Hooker 1993) pointed out that within a generation of independence, formal Indonesian had appropriated so much foreign and archaistic vocabulary that it was growing increasingly incomprehensible to all but the elite, and taking on many of the social functions of "high" Javanese. Errington (2000) has argued that this is part of an alternative kind of linguistic authority to that of the rationalist modernist standard, a persistence of the authority of "exemplary centers" characteristic of much older Javanese and other Southeast Asian forms of hierarchy. These functions, however, may go beyond the strategic play of status and exclusion. Thus, James Siegel (1986, 1997) has argued that Indonesian is functionally similar to "high" Javanese in that children learn to replace what they would have said in their original language with words imposed from without. To speak the high language is thus to display the suppression of the low (as retrospectively construed), with profoundly decentering implications for the speaker's sense of having an "own" language.

But if taboo and slang languages aim to create barriers within relatively more open language varieties, by contrast Indonesian is ideologically supposed to open outward. Indonesian thus differs from earlier forms of "internal translation" in its links to the modernist and cosmopolitan aspirations that underwrote its emergence, its vision of referential transparency, and the fact that it presents itself as an alternative to hierarchical registers. Despite its deep roots in Old Malay, Indonesian has not generally called on primordialist ideologies for its legitimacy. Rather, it has On Indonesian always been portrayed as modern, and as a vehicle for the modernization of Indonesian subjects and society. This is more than a matter of explicit claims on its behalf. As I have noted, the very practices through which Indonesian emerged bear the marks of language ideologies that are linked to ideas of modernity, treating language as a set of arbitrary signs that are subject to self-liberating forms of human agency.

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