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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nihil who wrote (26921)	12/11/1998 9:49:00 PM
From: jbe	Respond to of 108807

More on Asian language diversity. nihil, sorry to hear that the Asian experience with multilingualism (and multiethnicism) seems to have been uniformly negative (or so I assume from your very learned rundown). I know that your response was labelled "to be continued", but let me sneak in a request here, before the sequel appears. Can you address any of the specific questions I directed to Steven Rogers (who lives in the Philippines)? Such as: is the official status of Tagalog/Pilipino resented by non-native-Tagalog speakers? Do Filipinos prefer to use English or Tagalog as a lingua franca? To what extent is Tagalog "propped up" artificially by the government? And so on.. And what about Indonesia? Here, the former imperial language (in this case, Dutch) apparently cannot serve the function of a "neutral" lingua franca, as it does in many former colonies. And I would assume (and you do imply) that Bahasa Indonesian is resented by non-Javanese Indonesians. So how do Indonesians communicate with one another? Do they identify with one another? In other words, do they have a shared concept of national identity, despite their ethno-linguistic differences? Interestingly, the Soviet Union dealt with this problem somewhat better than some of the Asian countries, by your telling, have. Russian was designated as the language of "inter-ethnic communication", but native languages had official status, along with Russian, in the non-Russian republics and autonomies. Of course, in practice things did not go all that smoothly, and so in the end the whole thing fell apart.. jbe