The Management and Implementation of a Language Revitalization Project in Malaysia and Indonesia

International Journal of Management (IJM) Volume 11, Issue 9, September 2020, pp. 990-998, Article ID: IJM_11_09_093 Available online at http://iaeme.com/Home/issue/IJM?Volume=11&Issue=9 ISSN Print: 0976-6502 and ISSN Online: 0976-6510 DOI: 10.34218/IJM.11.9.2020.093

THE MANAGEMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION PROJECT IN MALAYSIA AND INDONESIA

James T. Collins Distinguished Professor, Institute of Ethnic Studies (KITA), The National University of Malaysia, Bangi, Malaysia

Chong Shin* Associate Professor, Institute of the Malay World and Civilization (ATMA), The National University of Malaysia, Bangi, Malaysia

Jamil Patty Lecturer, Sekolah Tinggi Keguruan dan Ilmu Pendidikan Gotong Royong, Masohi, Central Maluku, Indonesia.

Ajas Tihurua Research Assistant, Institute of the Malay World and Civilization (ATMA), The National University of Malaysia, Bangi, Malaysia *Correspondence Author

ABSTRACT There is now a complex generational rift reflected in attitudes towards language choice and language use due to the rapid expansion of schools, communication networks and new roads in both Malaysia and Indonesia. In the last 20-30 years, many communities have shifted from their traditional languages to dialects of the national languages of these two countries. This paper outlines the management and the implementation of a language revitalization project funded by the Toyota Foundation (Japan) in different villages, i.e. Tellian village (Mukah, Sarawak, Malaysia), Desa Pagal (West Kalimantan Barat, Indonesia) and Sepa (Seram, Maluku, Indonesia). The objective of the project was to survey the rift in language choice among the oldest generation, their children and youth under the age of 25 at these three villages. Then, the research team worked with villagers to find ways to bridge the intergenerational gap. The activities organized in this language revitalization project were: sponsoring local language contests, encouraging local language teaching in pre-school, meeting with villagers as well as government officials, distributing t-shirts with slogans in the local languages of the project, distributing captioned videos through YouTube and other electronic media. Through

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the in situ interactions with the local communities, it was learned that the loss of minority languages is an ongoing and critical phenomenon. Through these experiences and strategies, the team members realized that the path towards ensuring language maintenance is the commitment of the language community is to the transmission of its heritage language to the youngest generation by using it and by making it a valuable part of day-to-day life. Key words: Language Documentation, Revitalization, Endangered languages. Cite this Article: James T. Collins, Chong Shin, Jamil Patty and Ajas Tihurua, The Management and Implementation of a Language Revitalization Project in Malaysia and Indonesia, International Journal of Management, 11(9), 2020, pp. 990-998. http://iaeme.com/Home/issue/IJM?Volume=11&Issue=9

1. INTRODUCTION In the last twenty years, the documentation of endangered languages has emerged as a new subfield of linguistics with its own contemporary priorities and procedures. Twentieth century documentation, while based on data collection working with indigenous speakers to build a corpus of the language under study, was focused on producing grammars and lexicons, perhaps with some exemplary texts. The documentation of languages in this century produced a large quantity of language materials. However, many scholars would say that this documentation was simply language description and that today the focus needs to be on the data collected, the narratives, the texts, not on the linguistic analyses (see Himmelmann 1998). Twenty-first century documentation is markedly different from twentieth century documentation. There are several features of language documentation that merit highlighting. First, contemporary documentation emphasizes close collaboration with language communities. Second, documentation consists chiefly of making high-quality audio and video recordings. Third, the diversity of the registers and varieties of a language must be reflected by working with a variety of speakers in the language community. The intense interest in language documentation that has emerged in this century is not an unforeseen result of technological advances in multimedia and big data corpora. Today’s language documentation certainly draws on those technologies and resources but the impetus remains a sociological fact: language obsolescence and language death. The imminent loss of half of the world’s languages, precisely those languages that have been overlooked or understudied, is viewed as a depletion or diminishment of empirical resources for linguists. In other words, language documentation is for linguists and perhaps useful for a language community’s efforts to revitalize their language. Apparently, language revitalization is merely a second thought or a spin-off of the language documentation movement! Language revitalization is different from language documentation. While we definitely support language documentation, we must explore language revitalization as a separate enterprise, an enterprise in which revitalization comes first and documentation is a secondary product. In the following pages, a brief description of the plans and strategies for a language revitalization project in selected area in Malaysia and Indonesia is sketched out.

2. PROJECT INTRODUCTION This language revitalization project funded in late 2016 by the Toyota Foundation International Grant Program (Japan). Project D16-N-0074 (II-2018-003), entitled Attitudes Towards Language Choice and Ethnicity: Multigenerational Divergence and Rapprochement, is an international endeavor involving research sites in two Asian countries, Indonesia and

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Malaysia, under the direction of Dr. Chong Shin of the National University of Malaysia. The research plan was based on contemporary issues faced by heritage language communities in the region. Clearly, the rapid expansion of schools, communication networks and new roads in both Malaysia and Indonesia has impacted local communities. There is now a complex generational rift reflected in attitudes towards language choice and language use. In the last 20-30 years, many communities have shifted from their traditional languages to dialects of the national languages of these two countries. This endeavor can be considered a very focused micro-project conducted in three different villages but with the same procedures and aims. The three sites are: Tellian village in Mukah, Sarawak (Malaysia), Desa Pagal in Kalimantan Barat (Indonesia) and Sepa in Seram, Maluku (Indonesia). See Map 1 for an overview of the three research sites.

Figure 1 The three sites of the Toyota project (2016-2018) Each of these villages speaks a different Austronesian language. In Tellian, the Melanau language is the heritage language (see Chou 2002). Melanau with about 30,000 speakers is spoken in and around Tellian but in limited domains; the youngest generation in Tellian is unlikely to speak Melanau in public spaces. Pagal is a village located a 2-3 hour drive south of Kalimantan Barat’s second largest city, Sintang. The traditional language of the village is Desa, a language related to Iban and spoken by perhaps 40,000 people in Kalimantan Barat; see Herpanus (2009). Enhanced education and communication infrastructure as well as the presence of recently established hamlets of non-indigenous neighbors have had a negative impact on the use of the Desa language; many younger Pagal villagers (perhaps 60% of the total Desa population in the village) are not fluent speakers of their ancestral language. Much further to the east, the village of Sepa is located on the south coast of Seram. The Sepa language is spoken in a number of villages eastward along the south coast of Seram, albeit with different names and in different dialects (Collins 1983). In Sepa village, the language is spoken widely by villagers aged 25 and above; but only some of the villagers aged 25 or below can communicate in their heritage language.

3. OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT The objective of the project was to survey the rift in language choice among the oldest generation, their children and youth under 25 in three disparate villages in two different countries: Maluku (Indonesia), Indonesian Borneo and Malaysian Borneo. Then, working

http://iaeme.com/Home/journal/IJM 992 [email protected] The Management and Implementation of a Language Revitalization Project in Malaysia and Indonesia with villagers the plan was aimed at finding ways to bridge the intergenerational gap. There were four immediate goals.  First, practitioners need to understand the extent of the problem. Minority languages are becoming obsolescent and face extinction across these two countries. This is not a localized problem in their village or region. The distance between Sarawak and Maluku exceeds 2000 km. In between there are many, maybe, hundreds of threatened languages. By meeting and teaching each other about their areas and their situations they can understand the breadth and depth of the problem.  Second, this issue can be addressed with collaboration and discussion across generations. The oldest generation can be valuable resources. The team members themselves ranged in age from 22 to 68, and this mirrored the groups we want to work with in the three sites.  Third, by holding meetings with site visits in Maluku and Kalimantan as well as Sarawak, the team could observe the differences and decide if the products they planned to design could work in all three places. Maybe the advanced loss of minority language use in Maluku will raise the level of awareness among the team members from the other two sites.  Fourth and maybe most important, team members could understand WHY local languages have value as well as their relationship to identity and ethnicity. They could see this gap in language loyalty across generations as part of a larger unacknowledged shift in other crucial cultural and socioeconomic patterns of behavior.

4. THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT In this project, each site and region was supervised by team managers as well as the lead coordinator. They were: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Chong Shin (Lead coordinator), Prof. Dr. James T. Collins (Team advisor), Dr. Herpanus, Mr. Yohanes, Mr. Hendrik Mangku, Mr. Munarwar bin Azmi, Ms. Anna Marganingsih, Mr. Jamil Patty, Dr. Eka Dahlan Uar and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tang Howe Eng. Note that Chong Shin, James T. Collins, Herpanus and Jamil Patty were the facilitators in training and review sessions. In particular, Herpanus organized the project website (http://revolve.live) and the supervisor of Kalimantan Region. Tang Howe Eng was in charge of the Sarawak site and Jamil Patty supervised the site in Sepa (Maluku). The project began with a joint meeting of all the leading multi-generational personnel in Pontianak (Indonesia) in early December 2016. During the meeting, a shared, consistent survey methodology was devised and village selections confirmed. An important decision was made to formalize the training of the young persons who would work with the community elders. At first, the plan was for the coordinator and perhaps the consultant to travel to advise the assistants, but we saw that a rigorous training program with a practicum in the field needed to be included. When that was decided, we set up a training schedule for collaborators from each village. Table 1 shows the schedule for training activities for each research site.

Table 1 Initial training schedule. Month Project Site Training Site (2017) January Tellian Mukah, Malaysia February Pagal Sintang, Indonesia March Sepa Ambon, Indonesia

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In this project, young people from the selected villages were involved in this project. They worked with the older generation, their grandparents and elderly uncles and aunts in their village to collect materials to be distributed through media and to produce suitable local language materials. This shared task across generations was aimed at bridging the generational gap and empowering all members of the community. One of the early tasks was to train the youth to collect the materials suitable for language revitalization products. They sought input from elders through video-recording monologues and discussions about traditional or contemporary activities (for example, cooking, hunting, farming, or motorbike repair). These workshops were held as scheduled, beginning in February 2017 with the Tellian team. Chong (2017) reported in some detail about this first workshop in Mukah. In the workshop, in addition to discussions about language use and Melanau language issues, the Melanau youth participants, after training in techniques and reviewing videos from other programs, set off in teams of two to practice (i.e. video recording and interview methods) in the field. In this practicum, we chose Tellian village (Melanau village) as the training site. They were asked to find and interact with senior villagers and video record their daily activities. This half-day (8 a.m. – 2 p.m.) training yielded 10 quality video recordings, numerous photos and 5 sound recordings. All the contents of the videos exhibited a face-to- face interaction between the youth and the elders. So even from the beginning, this method proved that by allocating the recording task to the youth, they had opportunities to interact closely and warmly with the older generation. The following two workshops were based on the model of the Tellian workshop. But two major changes were put in place. First, instead of training young speakers of the target language (in Tellian the Melanau language), training was limited to young people from the specific project village. This meant that the team would be working with their family and friends, yielding better access and natural speech; it also implied that some members of the team might not be fluent speakers of the target language, a fact that led to bonding between the team members and the elderly speakers and a renewed interest in the language by the young team members. Second, the schedule for the second and third training workshops and practicums was extended from 2 days to 3-4 days. This allowed for more time to collect initial materials and more time to review the materials and learn ELAN (an annotation tool for audio and video recordings) transcription methods.

5. THE ACTIVITIES In the subsequent fourteen months (April 2017 - June 2018), numerous activities took place in all three project sites, as well as throughout the two countries involved. The activities in the villages have been aimed at collecting more materials, holding refresher workshops, training some new team members, organizing local language contests (see Illustration 1), training teachers of pre-school play groups in the use of materials developed by the team (flashcards, coloring books; see examples in Illustration 2 & 3), meeting with villagers as well as government officials, surveying villagers about language attitudes according to age cohorts, distributing t-shirts with logos and slogans in the local languages of the project (see Illustration 4), and, above all, producing and distributing captioned videos through YouTube (see Table 2 for the URL Links) and the project website, http://www.revolve.live. Team managers have organized public panels in Malaysia, public lectures in Indonesian cities, including Ternate, Kendari, Sintang, Ambon, Pontianak, Bengkayang and Lewoleba, as well as a formal talk at the University of Wisconsin in the U.S. Moreover, press coverage in print and electronic media has been substantial.

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Figure 2 Local language contest in Sepa

Figure 3 Sample of a coloring book in the Desa language.

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Figure 4 Flashcard teaching with pre-school children using the Desa language.

Figure 5 T-shirts with a slogans in the Melanau language.

Table 2 The example of videos in https://www.youtube.com Site Topic Youtube URL Potong Labu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROygIq6Ojhg&feature Pagal =youtu.be (Sintang) Rancak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IF04n8nFAY&feature =youtu.be Nyilit Tikar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmGtCz5o9iI&feature =youtu.be Mepit Kulit Badiew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGD3vvDV1dc&featur Telian e=youtu.be (Mukah) Menyet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tOmOnzvLm0&featur e=youtu.be Mengulut Sagok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBNF7GfpbeE&featur e=youtu.be Biking rumah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wTN5A8lZMg&featu Sepa re=youtu.be (Maluku) Biking Ikang https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKj25tkWXTw&featur e=youtu.be Buat Katupa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhiz1XRaxbY&feature =youtu.be

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6. THE IMPLICATIONS 6.1. Team Work Challenges Team work is the basic key to ensure the successful of a project. Due to differences in cultures, handling a project with team members of diverse backgrounds is a challenging task. Fortunately, all the team members were very supportive and gave full cooperation to this project. The interaction conducted in Malay/Indonesian among them both during the start-up meeting, the mid-term meeting and the closing seminar strengthened the implementation of this project as well as cross country relationships. For example, the design of T-shirts by the Sintang team supporting the use of the local language provided a model for designing similar T-shirts in Mukah and Sepa. The story-telling competition in a lower secondary school in Sepa served as a template for the story-telling contest held later in Mukah. The videos made in Mukah (January 2017) were part of the initial training programs for the Sintang and Sepa teams. We indeed learned a a great deal from each other and opened our eyes to other local cultures as well as the differences in the bureaucratic ―cultures‖ of Malaysia and Indonesia.

6.2. Current Status of the Endangered Language In this project, we learned that minority language loss is an ongoing and critical phenomenon both in Indonesia and Malaysia. This statement can be confirmed in the videos of the story- telling competitions. The teenage participants faltered in their efforts during the contests. Based on our experience, the main factor for the language loss in Malaysia and Indonesia is the perceived importance of the national languages—Malay and Indonesian. The younger generations in these two countries seem to have very positive attitudes towards their respective national languages, but rather vague or mixed attitudes towards their heritage languages. This situation was also reflected in the generational gap we detected in the language attitude surveys. Indeed, it was difficult to find a sufficient number of respondents from the youngest generation; many young people refused to participate.

6.3. Government and NGO Involvement The participation of government and NGOs in language preservation is different in Indonesia and Malaysia. For example, the Badan Bahasa (Indonesia’s National Language Agency) is regularly involved in language documentation and revitalization projects, whereas in Malaysia, the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (National Language Planning Office) merely produces dictionaries of local languages, for example a dictionary of the Melanau language; In Malaysia, the NGOs that participated in language or culture preservation are strongly supported by the government, but in Indonesia, these NGO efforts normally are carried out with the funding from private foundations. For example, AMANS (Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara), a nationwide NGO in Indonesia, receives its funding mainly from private donors and often foreign foundations, whereas the Persatuan Melanau Mukah (Mukah Melanau Association) in Malaysia receives strong financial support from the state government in Sarawak. As a result, with tis ear-marked, pre-committed funding, Indonesia’s AMANS was not able to respond in a timely way to the project suggestions, whereas in Malaysia the local Melanau Association quickly wrote the project’s story-telling contest into their annual Melanau Cultural Festival, offering a free, well-attended venue.

6.4. Other Issues Apart from the tangible outputs as noted above, we did note several intangible achievement, such as:

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 Providing skills and soft skill training for the local youth (especially video composition and editing technique), thus enabling them to produce videos by themselves in the future.  The effectiveness of communication among the youth and the elders in the village enabled us to continue minority language activities. For example, the youth in Sepa and Kenyabur (Desa speakers) are working on online dictionaries in their respective local languages, through funding from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), two member from UKM are now in the process of producing a dictionary of the Sepa language (GUP 201-006), using the same intergenerational techniques and video strategies developed in the Toyota project.  Perhaps equally important to academic linkages are the connections the project stimulated between team members and government bodies as well as NGOs. In Indonesia, for example, this project established strong links with the provincial office of the National Language Agency (Badan Bahasa) as well as good relations with the national office in Jakarta.

7. CONCLUSION Indeed, no one can deny that language documentation has become an important task for contemporary linguists. But, this revitalization project did not aim at producing dictionaries, grammars or analytic articles about deictics and verbal inflection. Nor have the materials been archived in electronic archives, although they are globally distributed through Youtube and the project website. The emphasis was on exploring ways to rejuvenate language use in communities where there are sufficient numbers of fluent speakers to transmit their heritage language. In this project, members of three local communities were empowered through intensive training and on-site practicums to collect authentic materials of their heritage languages. This was a successful project and the team members practiced strategies to ensure that a language community could remain committed to transmitting its heritage language to the youngest generation by using it with them and by making it a valuable part of their day-today lives.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The authors would like to express their gratitude to The Toyota Foundation, Japan (Grant Code: D16-N-0074) and The National University of Malaysia (Grant Code: GUP 2018-006) for the support of this project.

REFERENCES [1] Himmelmann. (1998). Emmons, R. A. Is spirituality intelligence, motivation, cognition and the psychology of ultimate concern? International Journal of the Psychology of Religion, 10(1), pp. 3–26. [2] Chong Shin. (2017). The Toyota Foundation International Grants Program Mid-term Report. Manuscript. Submitted to The Toyota Foundation, 28 April. [3] Chou Shu Hsiu. (2002). A reconstruction of Proto-Melanau. M.A. thesis, Bangi, Malaysia, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. [4] Herpanus. (2009). Etnolinguistik Dayak Desa: Zingiberaceae dan masyarakat, M.A. thesis, Bangi, Malaysia, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. [5] Collins, J. T. (1983). The historical relationships of the languages of Central Maluku, Indonesia. Pacific Linguistics, D47. Canberra: The Australian National University.

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