ARI Working Paper Series

Television has arguably been (and remains) the most important medium for promulgating Indonesia’s national language, Indonesian, certainly for popularising it as speech. This paper looks particularly at the treatment of non-Indonesian languages on television in Indonesia during the New Order, the age of which coincided with the development of television.

The paper examines how foreign languages were transferred into Indonesian, as a way to observe the place of the Indonesian language as a language of transfer between the foreign and familiar. The story of Indonesia’s handling of subtitling and dubbing of foreign language product on television – including the remarkable ruling in 1996 that required all foreign speech to be dubbed not into Indonesian, but into English with Indonesian subtitles, followed by the equally remarkable outlawing of dubbing in 1997 – was indicative of the complex and fast-changing linguistic situation in the archipelago.