I speak Indonesian, then I am

I would like to tell you about how our character is formed of how the way we communicate. It's about our respect to our culture.

We all know that Malaysia was colonized by the United Kingdom for about 75 years until independence in 1957. And now, we know that english is the second official language that used by the netizen over Malay. Even they have got difficulties to speak Malay by now.

Do you know? Even now Taxi's drivers in Malaysia are  using english to their passengers, no matter they can speak Malay or Indonesian or not. It shows how weak the character and personality of Malaysia in preserving their language.

In contrast to Malaysia, Indonesia had been colonized by The Netherlands for about 3.5 century. Over centuries we were occupied by the Netherlands until we manage to seize independence struggling by the colonizers in 1945. The heroes, our predecessors, have been fought very hard to defence our nation's character by the Occupiers.

To build a house for example, they put up a national Flag on the top of the plafond. They put up the national Flag and janur at the ceiling of their House as a manifestation of love for the homeland.

More than that, we have also been taught to love our own language, the language of each region instead of using Dutch as the language for daily communication. When we compared to Malaysia about the colonizing, we had been colonized by foreign Nations more longer. Even in 1928, our youth had declared to use Indonesian as the national language of the Union Nations Indonesia at the Sumpah Pemuda, whereas at that time we were colonized by the Netherlands. This is clearly showed that we have strong character by using our own language instead of Dutch. It is absolutely not because we can not speak Dutch, because at that time the there were many Netherland’s schools in Indonesia, and they used Dutch as the introduction for education.

The characters that implanted by our predecessors certainly indicated that we must be proud of our local languages, such as Malay, Javanese, Sundanese, Betawi, Bugis, Batak, and so on. At the regional level, to communicate with the people of the same ethnic group they could use their respective vernaculars. In addition, we should be proud of the Indonesian language as the  unifying language of our nation. As by indonesian we can communicate with the society from different ethnic groups, for example between madurese and Javanese, they can use the indonesian in order to understand each other.

How is to express our proud of our region language and indonesian as national language? Whether we should decline the Dutch or English which was commonly used by people in the world like nowadays? Our expression of proudness is keeping the language according to the context, appropriate conditions and situations. With whom, where and when we do communicate? We should putting ourselves in the right position.

Sure we do not want our grandchild can not speak Indonesian, so we must proud, by use Indonesian as daily communication to each other.

Do you know? Indonesian is ASEAN official language. Indonesian is used by 300 million ASEAN’s inhabitant in Indonesia, Singapura, Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam, South Thailand, and some of South Filipina. We must be proud!!!