Indonesia is one of the most multilingual nations in the world, with approximately 700 spoken local languages. This multilingualism is at risk from the imposition of the national language and the dominance of English as an international language. Adopting a social semiotic approach to linguistic landscape study, this paper explores how languages…

The Philippines is held as one of the largest English-speaking countries worldwide with most of its people possessing at least some degree of fluency in the target language. The prestige of the English language in this country has attracted the attention of many foreign students including Indonesian. In this paper, we aimed to discuss the…

This study explores the relationship between language selection and identity construction in contemporary Indonesia through an examination of the function of English, a language that still receives stigma from many Indonesians and the government, particularly in Indonesian popular texts published after 1998. Utilizing hybrid critical approaches…

One of the most widely spoken languages of the world, Bahasa Indonesia (BI), became standardized as the official language of Indonesia. Based on Malay, it served as lingua franca in various forms throughout the Indonesian archipelago for centuries. Although BI has been habitually learned as a second language, the number of native speakers of BI…

Among several hundred indigenous languages, Bahasa Indonesia gained pre-eminence as the national language of Indonesia during the country's first 50 years of independence. The fall of Soeharto in 1998 and the subsequent devolution of power to the regions might have been expected to lead to a resurgence in use of local languages but instead it…