We Don't Speak Dutch

For some reason, we got Dutch commentary for last night's Manchester United-Ajax game. Thank goodness it was switched to English halfway through the first half. It's not that I enjoy football commentary in particular, but hearing that oft-parodied language in the background of a United match was disturbing, to say the least.

"Oft-parodied", yes. You see, Republic of Indonesia was the Dutch East Indies once upon a time, and we didn't part ways in the best of terms. "We'll accept your claim of independence"--I can imagine the Crown said disdainfully--"if you pay the Dutch East Indies' debts. All of them." That's exactly what we did. And Indonesians disdainfully retaliate by reducing all Dutch to the role of blabbering bad guy almost every time they appear on motion picture/TV movies/literature.

Anyway, I don't know for sure what the Dutch's cultural strategy for this particular colony was, but I dare say it was markedly different from that employed by other colonial powers, the French, for example. The Dutch and their practicalities, you have to hand it to them, really. Why bother with the theoretical discourse about cultural superiority when one can opt for a more practical approach? Learning local custom, and then infiltrating them to foment discord or inspire submission, say? (The Dutch were great ethnographers.)

Long story short, the Dutch didn't promote their language in this part of the world and thus, Dutch--the language, I mean--had never really taken roots in Indonesia. In his memoir Doing Java, anthropologist Niels Mulder remarked how difficult it was in the late '60s-'70s to find Indonesians who were capable of conversing in foreign language (Dutch, English, German, anything). That was twenty, thirty odd years after we declared our independence. These days, many Indonesians understand English, but Dutch? Even my brother, who majored History and therefore was required to learn Dutch at college, only scoff at my notion that he should at least be able to read Dutch text.

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, it is the East Asian languages that seem to generate interest amongst young Indonesians. As for Dutch, a small number of my country fellowmen/-women will keep on learning it, no doubt, but while Dutch once functioned as a status symbol of some sort, nowadays fluency in Dutch would probably only earn you respect reserved for speakers of "exotic" languages, on a par with Russian or Farsi perhaps. Not too bad, eh?