Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

Farther east, Dutch presence proved shorter lasting. Ceylon and southern India, like the Cape colony, passed into British hands at the turn of the eighteenth century as a side effect of political changes in Europe. The century and a half of Dutch influence that was then brought to an end is hard now to discern. But although there was some similar back-and-forth in the East Indies—during which a thirty-year-old Stamford Raffles became for five years lieutenant-governor of Java, and chanced on the lost Buddhist wonder city of Borobodur—it ended with the British contenting themselves with the Malay peninsula and the northern coast of Borneo. Dutch control of the islands was ultimately maintained; in fact it lasted until the Second World War, a full three hundred years from their original dispossession of the Portuguese.

Why, then, is Dutch not now the official government language, or at least a lingua franca, in the state of Indonesia, the successor of the Dutch East Indies? Given that Dutch is another Germanic language, one is almost tempted to detect a ‘curse of Germanic’. Remember that despite their awesome conquests in western Europe and North Africa in the fifth century AD, the Franks, Vandals and Goths, alone among the great conquerors of the era, had never spread their language across their domains. And now, in the modern age from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, their descendants the Dutch were no more capable of winning new speakers for their language, when around them the British were spreading English in Malaya, Portuguese was persisting in its enclave on Timor, the Spanish were trying to bring up the Philippines in Castilian, and indeed the French were attempting to seed Indo-China as an outpost of francophony.

The fundamental reason for the curious absence of the Dutch language is the pragmatism of its speakers in the Indies. [129]They were there, after all, with two motives: primarily to make money, and secondarily—a long way second—to spead Protestant Christianity in their own dear Calvinist form. In the event, both motives called for the use of a foreign contact language, rather than their own mother tongue. For trade, in the first instance, there was evidently a need to use whatever language came to hand; and it turned out that there was already a language that the trading community of the East Indies had had in common for at least two centuries, and perhaps much longer.

This was Malay, Bahasa Mclayu (or in Dutch spelling Bahasa Melajoe ), best known as the jargon of merchants having dealings at the entrepôt of Malacca. Malacca had been founded only at the beginning of the fifteenth century, but had grown very fast, through exploitation of its commanding position on the strait, and cultivation of the Chinese emperor. It is likely that the spread of the language had started earlier than this. Malacca had been founded by a wayward prince from Śrī Vijaya, a state that had cultivated wide trading interests from the seventh to thirteenth centuries AD. And Jambi, one of its principal cities, had also been called Malāyu. Whatever Malay’s origins, with this one language in hand a Dutch merchant could do business all over the Indies, [130]an added advantage since the VOC was always interested in trade all over the area, not just simple exports from the sources of supply to the Netherlands. [597]

Likewise, in order to spread the faith and practice of the Dutch Reformed Church, it was easier, and quicker, to make converts when one was not restricted to those who already knew Dutch, or who might be willing to learn it. Early on, there had been an attempt to establish schools at Ambon in Dutch, with as many as sixteen of them running in 1627. But there were in fact few opportunities for children who learnt the language to use it after they graduated, and so they tended to forget it. [598]Probably this is a common feature of the early years of a language cohort, when they have not yet had time to be promoted up the system, and so are mostly dealing with adults who do not share the language. But the Dutch pragmatists were not prepared to wait, and the experiment was terminated. Malay became identified with Reformed religion too, designated as the language for ‘a common indigenous Church’. [599]

We might briefly query why the Dutch pragmatism did not extend to making use of another pre-existing lingua franca in their domains, namely Portuguese, which we have already noted they were required to use in dealings in Ceylon, and had indeed spread, willy-nilly, into their own centre of operations at Batavia. Certainly, some Dutch pastors, notably François Valentijn in the 1680s, were inclined to favour it over Malay in the work of the Church. [600]It is notable that conversions, never very many, were found mostly in congregations that had previously been converted to Catholicism by the Portuguese; the Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims turned out to be largely impervious to the new creed. But the association between Portuguese and Catholicism remained strong in Dutch Calvinist hearts; and in business, there must also have been a residue of pride, resisting any place for the language of their defeated enemies—indeed, until 1640 and the separation of Spain and Portugal, their resented overlords—in the mechanism of their own organisation.

And so Malay became the language of the Dutch Indies, first as a practical short-term measure, but by the eighteenth century by official policy. [131]In 1731-3 the Bible was issued in a Malay translation by Melchior Leydekker and Georg Henrik Werndly, and the latter brought out a grammar of the language in 1736. But despite the attempts to preach in it, knowledge of the language did not penetrate particularly deeply. Malay was a means of communication among administrators, managers, merchants and rulers, and so it stayed. Given the highly devolved nature of Dutch imperial administration, which largely kept the native power chiefdoms in place and was mediated through them, this at first worked well.

But the subsequent history of the language as used in the Dutch Indies was not a smooth one. In the mid-eighteenth century, as world markets came to value coffee from Java over spices from Ambon, the need grew to have direct dealings with the Javanese rulers, whose knowledge of Malay had never been good. The return of Dutch administration after the British interregnum under Stamford Raffles (1811-16) was on a new basis: the VOC had been abolished in 1795 after a collapse in its profitability, and there was a new concern for administrators to be in contact with the subject population. A decree of 1811 called for officials to know Javanese. Raffles himself, when he took over, was very much in favour, opining in 1813: ‘Hitherto the communication with inhabitants of the country has been chiefly through illiterate Interpreters, or when direct, through the medium of a barbarous dialect of Malays, confounded and confused by the introduction of Portuguese and Dutch.’ [601]

But when the Dutch were back in charge, there followed a controversy, which was to last throughout the nineteenth century, concerning the relative weight to be given to Javanese and Malay, with resolutions in 1827, 1837 and 1839 promoting Malay again. The practical value of knowing the actual language of a majority of the people was clear, but the embarrassing fact remained that Javanese, with elaborate inflexions and distinct sub-languages marking different levels of politeness, was far harder to learn tolerably than Malay. Results were never good, and most officials reverted to their broken and undignified, but always serviceable, dienst-Maleisch (’service-Malay’), known less respectfully as brabbel-Maleisch or klontong-Maleisch (’jabber-’ or ‘clod-Malay’). [602]

For all its faults (a standard system of Romanised spelling was specified only in 1901 [603]) it is this Malay which has become the official language of the state of Indonesia, under the wishful title of Bahasa Indonesia. Even today, though, only 17-30 million people there actually have it as a first language, perhaps a tenth of those who can use it as a second language. Compare this with the 75 million whose first language is Javanese, and the 726 languages that are listed as spoken somewhere within Indonesia. The Dutch, through their fitful policy, had succeeded in giving a common language to their old colony, but not their own.