Influence of English

Influence of English

Rexy Fayed – 361240

Not only just as a culture, English as a language also has had a huge impacts on Indonesia, both positive and negative. As a result of globalization, English as a global language has grown, developed and spread in all areas of this world. Even though the Center of Language Development in Indonesia has made several different efforts so as to not allow English to be used as an alternative of the Indonesian language, the impact and influence has been extremely huge that a lot of Indonesians have started to become more comfortable with the language and would be hard to prevent. With that being said, the most obvious and main influence English has had is on Indonesia’s very own native language, Bahasa Indonesia. English has caused Indonesia to start borrowing words from the English language and has converted it into a word of Bahasa Indonesia. For example; the word atlit refers to the sport term “athlete” in English. Apart from English influencing the huge amount of vocabulary in the official dictionary or Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia, it has also resulted in affixes, loan translations, some grammatical innovations including assimilated borrowed words.

In my opinion, English has contributed positively towards the business sector in Indonesia in terms of ease of communication. Take an example when an Indonesian businessman who wants to export their products overseas, one way of fulfilling this objective would firstly start with communication and a mutual language that could most definitely be used is English. However, with positivity, there would always be a tad bit of negativity. English could somehow result in some sort of inequality between people who are fluent and people who are not fluent in English. For instance, students in class who are more fluent in English tend to be more dominant in participating in discussions compared to those who are not that fluent. While it does really occur nowadays unlike in the earlier days, there used to be a discrimination of prestige caused by English. Only high class and education people spoke English while the lower class did not.