ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the political use and consequent revaluation of a “local language” in an eastern Indonesian polity. Following the 1998 collapse of Suharto’s authoritarian New Order regime, the Indonesian government instituted IMF-led democratizing and decentralizing reforms. One unexpected consequence of these reforms has been a widespread revival of local identities in Indonesia’s new regional politics. Relatively unnoted within this revival is the emerging importance of local languages in district level elections. Increasingly, politicians who had been accustomed to addressing their publics solely in a bureaucratic register of the Indonesian language found it necessary to speak publicly in local languages that index local ethnolinguistic identities. This chapter argues that these performances of local languages were moments of language contact in which shifting relations of scale between Indonesia’s hubs and peripheries became publicly perceivable, with the result that semiotic relations between the Indonesian “national language” and a “local language” were publicly imagined and contested.
