I first became interested in languages as a uniquely human part of our common condition, from a linguist's point of view on issues of structure. Since then the anthropological study of Javanese and Indonesian language have broadened my interests to involve the multiple embeddings of talk in community practices, institutional contexts, and historical dynamics.

Most of my research has been done in Central Java, a province of Indonesia, where I first studied changes in the forms and meanings of Javanese linguistic etiquette which occurred between about 1900 and 1980. Later I was able to return to rural, upland regions of this same province to study the ways Indonesian was spreading as a second language, and a vehicle of national identity.

While teaching in Yale's Department of Anthropology and chairing the Council on Southeast Asia Studies, I have focused increasingly on ideological dimensions of language: how it can express and change situated interests, partial perceptions, and shifting values. These complex issues are hard to avoid when studying political culture in multilingual, postcolonial societies like Indonesia's. These issues led me to study literacy as part of the work of linguistic description as it was done during the colonial era. This is the topic of Linguistics in a colonial world: a story of language, meaning and power, a series of loosely joined sketches of linguistic work that served and shaped colonial projects, not always as linguists planned or intended.

I am now doing research on language change in polyglot cities on three of Indonesia's "outer islands:" Kupang (West Timor), Ternate, and Pontianak (West Kalimantan). This is part of a larger project sponsored by the Netherlands Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology: "In Search of Middle Indonesia" (http://www.kitlv.nl/insearch.html). Working with colleages in anthropology and linguistics, I am gathering data of speech to develop a comparative account of Indonesian's role in the lives of an emerging middle class. I hope that I can develop a fine-grained "micro"study of talk in everday lives which can show how they are being shaped by "macro"forces of nation-building and globalization.