Bahasa Indonesia championed by Chinese

By Altaf Deviyati

September 2013 FEATURE
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With a population in the hundreds of millions scattered across thousands of islands, why did the whole of Indonesia decide to adopt a language mainly used by Chinese traders as its national language? Altaf Deviyati explains.“People can be very intelligent but if they do not write then they will disappear from society and history. Writing is the making of one’s immortality” – an apt quote from Ananta Toer from the book This Earth of Mankind, the first of his famous...

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Altaf Deviyati

is a senior analyst with the Political and Social Analysis Unit at the Penang Institute, working in the area of social inclusion.

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