What prevented the Dutch language from gaining ground in Indonesia?

**Etelfrido** · 12-15-2023, 10:02 PM

Why has Dutch never been promoted in Indonesia after almost 350 years of Dutch rule?

I though it could have to do with its distance from Europe which could be a similar answer to why Spanish isn't really spoken in the Philippines but even disconsidering English - whose presence in places like Singapore, Malaysia, and India could be explained by its status as a lingua franca - there's the case of Portuguese being an official language in East Timor and even more importantly its influence on Tetum, the country's most spoken language.

I also considered it could stem from the reluctance of the Dutch to mix with locals and create a mestizo population, but in the aforementioned countries there's no significant mixed population either, and that's also the case in the African coutnries where English, French and Portuguese are spoken.

The next explanation that came to my mind was that they never cared about expanding their language but that would require a reason for their exceptionality and there are also the counterexamples of Curaçao - a little island - and South Africa, where from my understanding Afrikaans is more restricted to the Boers.

Reading Maier's A Hidden Language - Dutch in Indonesia I came across a relevant passage on the 1928's Indonesian Pledge:

The original text of the Resolution, soon renamed Pledge, could be contextualized and of course the second Meeting is the most self-evident context, which could be extended to the first Meeting15, and – a short cut - to the cultural policies of the Dutch Indies administration. Present at the conference were people who preferred to speak Dutch among themselves but had another language for their so-called mother tongue: Javanese, Minangkabau, Toba Batak, Mandailing, Acehnese, Balinese – the colonial masters had counted at least three hundred fifty language in the Dutch Indies16. Living in the big cities of Java, far away from their homeland, and entertaining contacts with people of every possible walk of life and origin, they felt they had moved away from their land of origin, their homes, and they were looking for new roots and origins which, they thought, Dutch should give them, the language that had the aura of secrecy and sacredness.

Dutch was the language they had learnt at school: these were well-educated inlanders, most of them of good families, trimmed for positions in the administration and business in the Dutch Indies, so as to serve as mediators between Dutch masters and local subjects – and never they would have leading positions, which were only for Europeans, or rather: for white people, as the Dutch Indies was becoming a racially divided society, in which the ‘inlanders’ were told to remain in the margins of power and authority.

It's no surprise that the Dutch stablished a stratified society but shouldn't members of prominent families having a preference for Dutch over Indonesian be a legitimation for the acceptation and use of the language among the inlanders?