ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates Javanese, Indonesian, and English across three contexts in Salatiga, Central Java, namely street signage, interviews with Salatiga university students, and the implementation of “local content” curriculum in local schools. In doing so, it examines policies and metasemiotic commentary around the official and unofficial boundaries between Javanese, Indonesian, and English in a local polity of Indonesia. Results show that the language ecology in Salatiga is in shift, and that the semiotic registers that are identified as Javanese, Indonesian, and English are not static and are frequently overlapping—they are constantly used in combination according to the resources available in speakers’ communicative repertoires, which are decided by their subjective experiences and desired identities within this context. Through a discussion of these results, we see evidence for the idea that language policy making within the nation-state structure has a strong effect on language ideologies and the organization of semiotic and cultural scales throughout a polity. In other words, the Salatiga case suggests that multivalent “languaging” over time, may become what policy makers wish it to be, and that “top down” legislation continues to influence everyday language ideologies and use even in the post-Reform era.
