Every year, the Language Development Agency gives awards to some mass media outlets for excellent use of the Indonesian language.
Usually the award is bestowed in October, coinciding with the Language Month. However, this year, the award was bestowed only in December, because the Language Agency had been reorganizing itself in October. Like in the previous year, this daily received an award as a mass media outlet that is dedicated to the use of Indonesian – the highest award.
This year, the Language Agency also gave the Reksa award to Jakarta Governor Anies R Baswedan, who is considered a defender of the Indonesian language. Reksa, according to the Indonesian Dictionary (KBBI), means guard. It comes from Javanese. In Indonesian, some words come from regional languages, in addition to foreign languages.
The governor of Jakarta is considered to have preserved the Indonesian language by, among other things, asking the Language Agency for a new name for the mass rapid transit (MRT). The acronym MRT now stands for moda raya terpadu rather than the English words. The Semanggi Interchange was changed to simpang susun Semanggi and the integrated network of public transportation Jakarta OK OTrip was changed to Jak Lingko. Jak stands for Jakarta, while lingko is from the Manggarai regional language of East Nusa Tenggara, where it refers to networks for land irrigation.
The MRT train series was named Ratangga on Monday (12/10/2018). Ratangga is taken from the books of Arjuna Wijaya and Sutasoma by Mpu Tantular. In old Javanese, Ratangga means chariot and also stands for toughness and strength. Several public facilities have been renamed with Indonesian words or terminology to replace the foreign words.
British writer William Shakespeare said, “What is in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” However, for the Jakarta provincial administration, each name must have meaning, and every meaning must carry a message. Nothing is just given a name. The courage to raise a word or entry from a regional language to the national stage to become an icon in Jakarta deserves appreciation, including by the Language Agency.
Moreover, the growth of the number of entries in the Indonesian vocabulary is not encouraging. When the Indonesian encyclopedia KBBI was launched in 1983, around 62,100 entries were published. Five years later, the number of entries had only increased by 1,000 and then to 72,000 entries in the next edition. In 2005, the new KBBI contained 78,000 entries. The KBBI’s 2008 edition contains more than 90,000 entries, and the latest edition, from 2016, contains 127,036 entries. Some of the entries are adopted from foreign languages.
Compare this with the 2015 Oxford English Dictionary, which contains 171,476 used words and 47,156 words that were not used anymore, not including changes in word form. In total, there may be more than 750,000 words in the English dictionary. In fact, in this country, the Language Agency in 2018 noted that there were 668 regional languages still in use. Surely there are many words in regional languages that could explain foreign terms that exist in our lives. It is time to give regional languages a stage, not just preserve them, while developing Indonesian and mastering foreign languages.