nooj wrote:
What attitudes and discourses did you notice from Javanese people themselves, and I suppose, from other Indonesian people who were living there, concerning their language?
Did you use any of the resources from the ANU (the university in Canberra)? I recall they had created some useful resources for their courses of Javanese.
Great questions! As for resources, I didn't know about them at the time. I had an Indonesian textbook with a few phrases in Javanese (very limited in use) and also briefly used Mango Languages before I arrived (so formal and bookish as to be useless). In Indonesia, the teachers of Javanese classes for non-natives used material they wrote themselves.
As for language attitudes, I think I'm much more sensitive to this kind of thing now, for starters. Back then I knew a lot, but I have a much more complex understanding now about how minority languages work. So all of these memories are filtered through my knowledge and interpretations at the time.
I got the sense that basically all Yogyakarta locals used Javanese and Indonesian with equal facility, and that Javanese was a language a local person my age would use in the following settings: with family, with a group of friends consisting only of Javanese-speakers, and with a Javanese small business owner whose customers were also Javanese. So in a mixed setting, the default for everyone I knew was to switch to Indonesian. This was not the case for a friend I knew, a white woman from America who lived in the next city over and also spoke good Indonesian. There, she was in fact fully expected to learn Javanese in order to keep up with friends' conversations. This shows me that my own perspective was shaped a great deal by the international and fairly academic environment I was in. Three large, famous universities were all next to each other and I remember that most people my age were students in that part of town.
My Javanese professor taught the class fully in Indonesian to a mix of students from the upper-level Indonesian for Foreigners courses. We met just once a week and the material was, from what I remember, based on analyzing dialogues between friends and in markets. The TA was a student who had a hobby of calligraphy in the Javanese alphabet and wanted to promote Javanese to everyone. Still, there was no
pressure to speak Javanese from anyone. Perhaps I'm remembering wrong, but the professor and TA would first speak in Indonesian to us rather than push us to converse in Javanese. One clear memory from that professor was her lamenting that a lot of Javanese writing around Yogyakarta on signs and storefronts was misspelled in basic ways, showing that people wanted to use the alphabet as an identity marker but without putting the effort into correctly learning the script.
I stayed in Surabaya for one or two nights and happened to meet literally the only Indonesian YouTube celebrity I was even aware of,
Londokampung. I greeted him in Javanese in a mall, much like his "White guy speaks Javanese" videos, and he was very surprised and pleased by this. Even in that short stay, I could feel that Surabayans used Javanese in places I never heard it in Yogyakarta, like upscale restaurants in malls. I strongly recommend Londokampung's video series from last year where he interviewed other advanced non-ethnically-Indonesian speakers of Javanese about their attitudes toward the language.