Frontiers of the lingua franca: Ideologies of the linguistic contact zone in Dutch New Guinea

Abstract

This essay explores ideologies of the linguistic contact zone in western New Guinea, a region that was once a colonial backwater, but is now the Indonesian province of Papua (formerly Irian Jaya), where a separatist movement is underway. The analysis focuses on the efforts of colonial missionaries to draw firm boundaries between Malay, the Netherlands Indies' lingua franca which later became Indonesian, and the Papuan language known as Mefoorsch. The failure of these efforts reveals the shortcomings of analyses that present ‘heteroglossia’ as a feature of Indies society that Dutch colonials discovered, then mastered by creating standard versions of the archipelago's many languages. Divergent ideologies not unlike those that thwarted previous generations of Protestant reformers confront today's Papuan nationalist leaders, who share a single language of unity with their foes, yet dream of making Papua into a linguistically purified space.

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