Indonesia has an extreme diversity of linguistic wealth, with 707
languages by one count, or 731 languages and more than 1,100
dialects in another estimate, spoken by more than 600 ethnicities
spread across 17,504 islands in the archipelago. Smaller, locally
used indigenous languages jostle for survival alongside Indonesian,
which is the national language, regional lingua francas, major
indigenous languages, heritage languages, sign languages and world
languages such as English, Arabic and Mandarin, not to mention
emerging linguistic varieties and practices of language mixing. How
does the government manage these languages in different domains
such as education, the media, the workplace and the public while
balancing concerns over language endangerment and the need for
participation in the global community? Subhan Zein asserts that
superdiversity is the key to understanding and assessing these
intricate issues and their complicated, contested and innovative
responses in the complex, dynamic and polycentric sociolinguistic
situation in Indonesia that he conceptualises as superglossia. This
offers an opportunity for us to delve more deeply into such a
context through the language and superdiversity perspective that is
in ascendancy. Zein examines emerging themes that have been
dominating language policy discourse including status, prestige,
corpus, acquisition, cultivation, language shift and endangerment,
revitalisation, linguistic genocide and imperialism, multilingual
education, personnel policy, translanguaging, family language
policy and global English. These topical areas are critically
discussed in an integrated manner against Indonesia's elaborate
socio-cultural, political and religious backdrop as well as the
implementation of regional autonomy. In doing so, Zein identifies
strategies for language policy to help inform scholarship and
policymaking while providing a frame of reference for the adoption
of the superdiversity perspective on polity-specific language
policy in other parts of the world.
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