A farewell to Javanese studies? Willem van der Molen and more?

More than 95 million people speak Javanese as a child, at home, with friends and family, but very little receive further education in the complicated language of the largest ethnic group of Indonesia. The enormous success of Indonesian as official language since 1945 has brought a drastic decline in the use of Javanese. Therefore there is a threat that Javanese will die as a cultivated language! This was one of the themes at the farewell conference at KITLV, Leiden, 12 and 13 December this year, at the occasion of the official retirement of Willem van der Molen (postponed one year because last year he was involved in a programme of studies on Panji stories at the Hebrew University of Tel Aviv).
Tony Day opened the series with the beginning of Javanese classical writings: why was translation, prakrit, or vernacularisation so important (because so much of what has been rescued from Old Javanese writings is translation or adaptation of Sanskrit texts). He was (among various otther scholars) followed by Gregory Quinn, who commented about the end: Ronggowarsito as 'the seal, not of the prophets but of Javanese literature'! He mentioned four reasons for the decline of Javanese in general: 1) Loss of the aristocratic authority (the courts of Yogya and Solo no longer have active pujangga kraton); 2) there is a loss of ability to read Javanese script. As an example he gave the emphasis in primary schools on the mystical meaning of the letters, without training to use it as an effective alfabet; 3) loss of official status: in state documents, in the bureaucracy; 4) decline of ability to speak and write high Javanese.

 

But Quinn also had some good news. He met several groups who were writing stories and poetry , published magazines, series of books, partly as hybrid publishing (initially paid by the authors themselves, only after success the authors earned some money). There are websites. There is even a Wikipedia in Javanese with more than 57.000 articles: https://jv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tepas.