Almost Unbridled: Indonesian Youth Language and its Critics

Abstract

Teenlit, a genre of popular literature for adolescents, was introduced to Indonesia around the beginning of the last decade and almost immediately attracted a large readership consisting predominantly of female adolescents. Its rapid rise has invited both favourable and hostile reactions from observers. Sympathetic literary critics view young people's attraction to it as a positive process towards the development of a healthy reading and writing habit. Meanwhile, hostile critics consider it as nothing more than light fiction containing questionable moral values, written in an unacceptable style. This article examines a representative example of such criticisms as a platform for discussing the relationship between the relatively new genre of adolescent literature and the wider context of language change. It seeks to show that hostility towards teenlit reflects a concern for the maintenance of standard Indonesian as the language of literature amid a rapidly changing language situation in which a major colloquial variety of Indonesian has been gaining prominence and encroaching on domains prescriptively associated with the standard variety, such as written literature. The negative reaction is also an assertion of an idealized view of literature, which holds that the function of adolescent fiction is to educate readers on the aesthetic function of language and sound moral values. The author demonstrates that this concern arises against the backdrop of a socio-political climate in which the state, having long exerted control over language use and language development, gradually ceases to be perceived as the sole authority on language. As such, it is an articulation of a desire to safeguard the existence of a linguistic authority.

Style and Intersubjectivity in Youth Interaction

“…Authority figures regularly decry such behaviour and often focus on youth language practices in their critiques (Milroy and Milroy 1997). For instance, in Indonesia, academics and other authority figures lament the use of colloquial Indonesian by young people as a "crisis of youth" (Sabarini 2007) and a threat to the integrity of the Indonesian language (Djenar 2012). Yet, the relationship between authority and youth is paradoxical.…”

Adolescent social media interaction and authorial stance in Indonesian teen fiction

“…They perceived the shifts between the two varieties -common in teenlit novels -as an example of sloppy language use and a reflection of the writer's lack of writing skills. Elsewhere (Djenar 2012) I show that this view is misguided though based on a genuine concern about The first Indonesian teenlit novel, according to teenlit editors at Gramedia publishing house (Hetih Rusli and Novera; interview July 2007), is Eiffel I'm in love (Arunita 2001). maintaining the standard of literary language.…”

preliminary exploration

“…Smith-Hefner 2007, Djenar 2008 have shown how non-standard BI youth language varieties index a national yet cosmopolitan identity that is distinct from those that are indexed by local languages or by standard BI. This often leads non-standard youth language to be stigmatized as unacceptable both because of the perceived lack of quality of the language and also because of the questionable morals and lifestyle this language is viewed to represent (Djenar 2012). …”