why you no speak english?

Another post that was inspired by a tweet :)

A friend tweeted that most upper-middle Indonesian kids now speak fluent English and broken Indonesian, and was wondering whether it is a bad thing.

With the mushrooming of posh international schools in big cities in Indonesia, it is inevitable. The classes are taught in English, the books are in English. Those kids spend most of their time at school conversing in English. Their references are mostly in English. I guess the only time they converse in Indonesian is when they talk to the maids at home or to the taxi drivers.

I went to school in the mid 80s and early 90s. English was taught in class only when I was already in Junior High and we had no English literature as reference. As a result, save for those who went overseas for uni, most of my generation don't speak fluent English. I work in a multinational company, most of my clients are multinational companies, but only a select few can speak fluent English like a native. For the rest of us, we speak Indonesian English.

Any skill is useful. It makes people interesting. It makes people employable. And English is certainly useful. There are many times I was hired simply for my ability to write in English with minimum grammatical error, for a local fee. I created a niche.

Brown skinned Indonesian children living in Indonesia conversing in English may seem annoying, but it's probably not such a bad idea because it will increase their chances to enter the global market in the future. Ideally one should be bilingual and can speak both languages fluently, or even multilingual. But not everyone is born smart. If for some reasons their brains can only manage to master one language fluently, for me English is more useful than any other language, simply because it's the international language.

As for broken Indonesian, the sad truth is that nobody speaks proper Indonesian anyway. Written Indonesian and spoken Indonesian are two different things entirely. Spoken Indonesian is a mixture of slang and dialects while proper Indonesian remains in the books and newspapers. I should know this because many times when I proposed a copy or headline using proper Indonesian in the ads that I wrote, the consumers did not understand it.

What about our nationalism then? I'm not an expert in that subject, but for me it's simple: if we do useful things for our country, such as creating employments like the broken-Indonesian-speaking Indonesian Chinese business owners do, that should do the trick.

I guess next time we sit next to English-speaking-brown-skinned Indonesian children in an international chain coffee shop in Jakarta, we should go easy on them :)

pic reblogged from http://gomersasquatch.wordpress.com/page/3/