Multilingual youth literacy and linguistic polycentricity in contemporary Indonesia
Kristian Tamtomo, Departmen of Anthropology, University at Albany

This paper will describe my proposed research investigating the social meaning and identity indexed by multilingual literacy practices of Indonesian youth in the city of Semarang, Central Java. Youth multilingualism involves not just the use of regional/local languages such as Javanese but also the Indonesian national language (Bahasa Indonesia) as well as global languages like English. The paper will first present three examples of Indonesian youth language practices drawn from the academic literature to show how the uses of these local, national, and global languages highlight shifting ideologies of language and Blommaert's notion of polycentric language orientations among Indonesian youth. The languages used by youth also link them to different scales of identity and social meaning. However, these examples still portray youth as using the three types of languages separately. The proposed research seeks to investigate the multilingual use of all these languages in youth's literacy activities and interpret the social meaning this multilingual usage has for youth, using an analytical framework grounded in the study of language ideology and notions of indexicality. By focusing on the three types of languages, the research aims to show that multilingualism and globalization in Indonesia are not just about issues of language shift and the intrusion of global languages but also characterized by the interaction between local, national and global languages in contemporary communicative practices.

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