Anthropos 85.1990: 329-344
The Multilingualism of a Balinese Community
in Western Lombok
Andrew Duff-Cooper
Abstract. - The study is descriptive and theoretical. It consid
ers Balinese ideas that include sound, and find that “Sound,” a
complex notion, is such that speech is one kind of “sound”
among others. The study then considers forms of sound in
the village, examining in turn the uses and their contexts of
Sasak, Old Javanese, Sanskrit, English, Dutch, Indonesian, and
Balinese. To analyze speech and language other ideas have
to be taken into account because all Balinese social facts are
Maussian social facts. It then considers language accretion. This
is not considered under “active” or “passive” but as processes of
local redintegrations which are a key to the kind of community
the processes are involved in forming - a form that does
not compromise earlier versions of it. [Bali, Lombok, sound,
language(s), contexts of use, local redintegration]
Andrew Duff-Cooper, D. Phil., until recently a Research Fel
low and Visiting Lecturer at the Institute of Cultural and Lin
guistic Studies, Keio University, Tokyo, is the Cosmos Fellow
of the University of Edinburgh for 1989/90 and a Professor at
Saitoku University, Japan. Since living on Lombok in 1979-81,
he has published numerous articles about the Lombok Balinese.
He has also published studies about Japan. A book about
Balinese life on Lombok as a totality is in preparation. See
also References Cited.
“Speaking a language fluently is very different
from understanding it.” (E. E. Evans-Pritchard
1965: 7)
1. Introduction
The community referred to in the present title
is the village (kaklianan) Baturujung, one of the
Balinese kampung of the lurah Pagutan, kecama-
tan Ampenan, which lies about 4 km southwest of
Cakranegara, now an important commercial cen
ter, and some southeast of Mataram, the
provincial capital of Nusa Tenggara Barat. Until
recently Baturujung had a population of about
375. 1 We will also be concerned with the Gria
Taman, three or four minutes to the southwest of
Baturujung through the gardens, in the village Be-
latung, where about 30 people, mainly Brahmana,
reside. 2 In 1980, the population of Pagutan was
14,225; of this number 10,689 are recorded by the
lurah office as Sasak Muslims, 3,300 as Balinese
Hindus. 7,292 people are reported as never having
attended school. Of those that had attended ele
mentary school (S.D.) - of which there are four
in Pagutan with a staff in 1980 of 43 serving 480
pupils - 4,000 did not complete the course, 2,570
did. Only 163 have gone to a higher school in
town, and only one person had received a form of
higher education (perguruan tinggi).
Occupations of the residents of Pagutan are
in the main non-professional, only 562 having a
white-collar, administrative, or professional job.
Most people are more or less directly involved
in agri- and horticulture and in the husbandry of
animals and/or chickens and ducks.
The languages we will be concerned with
are: Sasak, Old Javanese (kawi), Sanskrit, Dutch,
English, Indonesian, and Balinese. Language in
itself was not a prime focus of the field research
on which the present study is mostly based, but
naturally I acquired some knowledge about these
languages as they are in evidence in Baturujung
1 Sadly this figure may be much lower now: in a letter
dated 30 Dec. 1987 which I have his permission to cite,
I Nyoman Kanten, a younger brother of my friend I Wayan
Care, writes that “all my families,” except his father and
a younger brother, are to leave the village on January
20, 1988, for southern Sulawesi as transmigrants. Lombok
joined Bali and Java as donor areas for the Indonesian
government’s transmigration program in 1973.
2 I conducted field research in Pagutan for about 21 months
in 1979-81 with the financial support of the Social Sci
ence Research Council of Great Britain and of the Emslie
Homiman Anthropological Scholarship Fund of the Royal
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland with the sponsorship of Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan
Indonesia, to which bodies I am gratefully obliged. I lived
for about 11 months in the Gria Taman as the guest of Ida
Pedanda Gde Made Karang (Pedanda Gde), the rest of the
time in Baturujung. The four estates of the Balinese are,
in descending order of fineness: Brahmana, Ksatrya, Vesia,
Sudra. To conserve space references to my work have most
often been omitted in the text; fuller treatment of many
of the aspects of Balinese life touched on in this study
will be found in the articles listed under my name in the
“References Cited.”