Statehood, Scale and Hierarchy

Against the background of language and nation formation in Indonesia, this book demonstrates how language planning is inseparable from the broader actions of the state, and how postcolonial nationalism and globalization have had profound implications for language use and state actions to control it.

Lauren Zentz is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Houston, USA. Her research interests include language policy, language and identity, and nationalism and state formation.

Lauren Zentz is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Houston, USA. Her research interests include language policy, language and identity, and nationalism and state formation.

In this powerfully written book, Lauren Zentz presents both a sociolinguistic ethnography and a sociolinguistic ethnohistory of shifting language positionalities in Indonesia. Against a backdrop of postcoloniality and globalization, she shows how ideology and access work to scale and re-scale linguistic ecologies and communicative repertoires, as languages are “created” and hierarchized in the context of nation-building. Eminently readable, this engaging account charts important new ground in critical applied linguistics and the ethnography of language policy.

Zentz’s rigorous scholarship presents a powerful, fine-grained, richly detailed, ethnographically insightful, and theoretically compelling study of language practices and policies situated in the complex web of social, historical, and political dynamics of local, national and global forces in contemporary Indonesia.

Lauren Zentz uses sophisticated theory and methods to offer highly accessible, yet incredibly nuanced insights into the relationships between language and globalization. The book offers a brilliant account of university students’ ideologies about Indonesian, Javanese, and English, and how these ideologies are mediated by other language ideologies from diverse, constantly changing, and hierarchically organized scales. Zentz has written an instant classic that will secure a space on reading lists for a long time to come.

Just brilliant. Zentz’s analysis is admirably nuanced, fresh and challenging. Her insight compels us to radically reconsider the familiar notions of social identity, institutionalised power, and the politics of languaging in a world dominated by English.