The lexicography of regional languages

in Indonesia

Susi Moeimam and Tom Hoogervorst

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Historical background to the lexicography of Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese . . . . . . . . 3
Javanese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Sundanese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Madurese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Future prospects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Abstract
Dictionaries and other lexicographical material on Javanese, Sundanese, and
Madurese, Indonesia’s three largest regional languages, have been published
from colonial to independent times. The study of indigenous languages was
part of the Dutch colonial language policy from the nineteenth century onwards
to facilitate missionary activities and communication with local rulers. As a
result, a substantial corpus of lexicographical and grammatical studies appeared
with Dutch as either the source or target language. Many of these works were
compiled by scholars primarily employed as Bible translators. Only from the
twentieth century onwards, and especially since Indonesia’s independence, have
lexicographical publications of a more diverse (yet not necessarily more compre-
hensive) nature entered the scene. Numerous contributions have been made by
scholars working for Indonesia’s national language center and catering to

S. Moeimam (*)
Wacana, Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Indonesia, Depok, Indonesia
e-mail: moeimam@gmail.com
T. Hoogervorst
Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Leiden, The Netherlands
e-mail: hoogervorst@kitlv.nl

# Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2017 1

P. Hanks, G.-M. de Schryver (eds.), International Handbook of Modern Lexis and
Lexicography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45369-4_117-1
2 S. Moeimam and T. Hoogervorst

Indonesian readers. Thus far, the lexicography of Javanese, Sundanese, and

Madurese has not fully benefited from recent technological possibilities, such
as interactive online dictionaries.

Introduction

Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese (henceforth: Jv., Sd., and Md.) are the biggest
regional languages (bahasa daerah) in Indonesia, with respectively 84,300,000,
34,000,000, and 6,770,000 speakers.1 Alongside Malay, they were among the few
Indonesian languages deemed suitable by the Dutch colonial government for education
and modern literature. Javanese is the dominant language throughout the central and
eastern parts of Java, Indonesia’s most highly populated island. Distinct Javanese
varieties are also found along the north-western coast of the island, including Banten
and Cirebon. Due to migration in colonial and post-independence times, significant
Javanese speech communities are also found in other parts of Indonesia, Malaysia,
Suriname, New Caledonia, and the Netherlands. Sundanese is mainly used in West
Java, whereas Madurese predominates on Madura, a number of nearby islands, and
certain districts in East Java. Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese belong to the Malayo-
Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family, as do Malay (see the chapter, in
this handbook, by Kwary and Jalaluddin), Tagalog, Tetum (see the chapter, in this
handbook, by Van Engelenhoven), and numerous other languages spoken in Insular
Southeast Asia. Their precise sub-grouping is still a matter of debate (cf. Blust 2010).
Of the three languages, Madurese has the most complex phonology due to the
presence of aspirated consonants and associated patterns of vowel harmony (Stevens
1968). Like Javanese, Madurese contrasts a dental and retroflex /d/ and /t/. All three
languages can modify base words through a number of prefixes, suffixes, and
circumfixes. One notable morpho-phonological process is verbal pre-nasalization,
whereby word-initial stops are preceded or substituted by their homorganic nasals to
form active verbs. For example, Javanese carita “story” can produce ny-(c)arita-k-ke
“to tell a story.” A basic knowledge of morphology is therefore required when using
dictionaries of these languages. In addition, Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese
exhibit so-called speech levels, characterized by socially determined lexical pairs
whose usage depends on the position of the speaker, addressee, and referee. The
most common speech levels are “refined” (Jv. basa, Sd. lemes, Md. alus), “middle”
(Jv. madya, Sd. sedeng, Md. tenga), and “common” (Jv. ngoko, Sd. loma,
Md. kasar). For example, the Javanese word for “you” is panjenengan in refined
speech, sampeyan in semi-refined speech, and kowe in common speech. Because of
these complexities, the choice of Malay over Javanese as Indonesia’s national
language was almost universally agreed upon, although the latter possessed consid-
erably more native speakers. Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese were originally

1
Numbers from Ethnologue (which can be accessed at https://www.ethnologue.com/), based on a
2000 census.
The lexicography of regional languages in Indonesia 3

written in Indic-derived semi-syllabic scripts, which show significant variations over

time and place (cf. de Casparis 1975). Of these, the modern Javanese script
(Jv. hanacaraka, Sd. cacarakan, Md. carakan) has been used in Dutch printing
presses from the second half of the nineteenth century. All three languages have also
been written in Arabic-derived scripts (Jv. and Sd. pegon, Md. peghun).
Given our space limitations, we will not here discuss the lexicography of the
numerous other regional languages in Indonesia. Uhlenbeck (1964) contains a still-
relevant overview of scholarship on Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, and other Indo-
nesian languages, which deserves to be made up-to-date. A bibliography of lexico-
graphical work intended for an Indonesian readership appeared 12 years afterwards
(Bibliografi 1976). A short overview of the historical background to the lexicography in
Indonesia can be found in Kridalaksana (1979) and also in this book’s chapter on Malay
(see the chapter, in this volume, by Kwary and Jalaluddin). Concise information on
some lexicographical publications on Javanese can also be found in the “Introduction”
to the Javanese-English dictionary by Robson and Wibisono (2002, pp. 10–14).

Description

Historical background to the lexicography of Javanese, Sundanese,

and Madurese

The Indonesian Archipelago features a number of Indic-inspired encyclopedic

traditions, which include lexicographical scholarship of a predominantly thesauric
nature.2 Such works were helpful to scholars and poets to find the right word for a
certain meter or identify colloquial equivalents of archaic lexemes. A genre known
as kertabasa, still existing in Bali, typically contains lists of synonymous nouns
(cf. Schoterman 1981). In modern Javanese, similar lists are called dasanama,
whereas Old Javanese glossaries are known as kawi-jarwa (cf. Poerwadarminta
1931–1932). It appears that the accessibility of such works was often of secondary
importance to their compilers (cf. Arps 1999). Quite separately from this tradition,
several bi- or trilingual glossaries compiled by Malay-speaking scholars can be
found in university libraries and, presumably, in private collections. These hand-
written works typically juxtapose Malay and one or more regional languages.3 The
earliest Malay-Javanese word-list known to us appeared in 1658 (Wieringa 1998,
pp. 205–206), whereas a Sundanese-Malay vocabulary and phrasebook was written
as early as 1851 in the cacarakan script (Wieringa and Hanstein 2015, pp. 90–93).
At least one example is known of an Arabic-Malay-Sundanese wordlist: the 1897

2
The Sanskrit term śabdakośa for “dictionary” has never been in frequent use in the Indonesian
Archipelago. Instead, Javanese has bausastra (from bahuśāstra “many books”), whereas
Sundanese and Madurese use the Malay and ultimately Arabic loan kamus.
3
See, for example, an early nineteenth-century vocabulary of Malay, Javanese, and Madurese,
consisting of more than 3000 entries, which has recently been digitalized by the British Library
(MSS Malay A 3).
4 S. Moeimam and T. Hoogervorst

Fig. 1 Qamus kecil

Arabiyyah, Melayu, Sunda
(Sayyid ʻUthmān 1897)

Qamus kecil Arabiyyah, Melayu, Sunda (see Fig. 1) compiled by the famous
religious expert (mufti) Sayyid ʻUthmān (Kaptein 2005).
Under the Dutch colonial government, lexicographical studies of Indonesian
languages (then known as inheemsche talen “indigenous languages”) are inseparable
from the history of missionary zeal (Swellengrebel 1974; Groeneboer 1993). Most of
the missionaries burdened with the task of Bible-translating also published lexico-
graphical and grammatical work on “their” languages.4 Their efforts gave rise to

4
Some well-known names include Hillebrandus Klinkert (Malay), Johann Gericke (Javanese),
Pieter Jansz (Javanese), Sierk Coolsma (Sundanese), Hendrik Kiliaan (Madurese), Herman van
der Tuuk (Batak languages, Lampung, Balinese), Benjamin Matthes (Bugis and Makassar), and
August Hardeland (Ngaju).
The lexicography of regional languages in Indonesia 5

ideas of language standardization in the Archipelago. Reflecting contemporaneous

European ideas of language purity, the Bible translators felt the need to decide which
region was home to the “purest” variety of the language under research. For
Javanese, the choice fell on the city of Surakarta (Solo). Bandung was selected for
Sundanese, and Sumenep for Madurese. This problem settled, a coherent system of
romanization had to be developed, although some of the earlier dictionaries used the
Javanese script, also for Sundanese and Madurese. Besides missionary interests,
proficiency in local languages was also necessary for the Dutch administrators to
communicate with indigenous rulers. For that reason, language documentation
became part of governmental policy-making, yielding dictionaries, grammars, and
teaching books intended for civil servants and missionaries alike. This was also the
time in which Netherlands-based indologists and philologists, such as Taco Roorda,
Rudolf Kern, Philippus Roorda van Eysinga, and many others, made significant
contributions to the study of Indonesian languages.
During the Japanese occupation, the multilingual Kotoba no tebiki (“Language
handbook”) was published (1943), containing Japanese, Malay, Javanese,
Sundanese, and Madurese vocabulary (see Fig. 2). A comparable “quintilingual”
wordlist appeared half a century later at the hands of Sugiarto and Suwandi (1993) –
covering Indonesian, Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, and Balinese – whereas a
Javanese-Sundanese-Indonesian dictionary was published by Hartono in 1997. The
vast majority of post-independence dictionaries, both monolingual and bi- or mul-
tilingual, were compiled by Indonesian scholars and intended for Indonesian readers,
typically with standard Indonesian as the meta-language. No less than 204 bilingual
dictionaries with Indonesian as the source and/or target language are listed in the
Bibliografi Perkamusan Indonesia (“Bibliography of Indonesian Lexicography”)
published in 1976, and many more have appeared since then. Scholars of the
Badan Bahasa (“Language Agency”) – Indonesia’s national language institute
previously known as the Lembaga Bahasa dan Budaya (“Institute for Language
and Culture”) and Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa (“Centre for
Language Development and Cultivation”) or, in short, Pusat Bahasa – have been
behind most of these works. As is common in the field of lexicography, they are
often reworkings of previous materials.

Javanese

As Indonesia’s largest regional language, the Dutch had long been motivated to
master Javanese in order to communicate directly with Javanese rulers. While
European-compiled wordlists show up from the mid-seventeenth century, the first
known Javanese dictionary was an anonymous work entitled Lexicon Javanicum
(1706) currently kept at the Vatican Library (Uhlenbeck 1964, p. 43). It contains
romanized Javanese entries and Dutch glosses. A comparative vocabulary of Malay,
Javanese, Madurese, Balinese, and Lampung – the first of its kind – is given in
Raffles’ monumental History of Java (1817). Another Englishman, John Crawfurd,
collected unpublished Javanese data in 1820. This material was later used by
6 S. Moeimam and T. Hoogervorst

Fig. 2 Kotoba no tebiki (1943)

Wilhelm von Humboldt in his pioneering work on the Old Javanese or Kawi
language (1836–1839). Special mention should also be made of Hendrik Domis, a
government official (resident) in Pasuruan from 1827 to 1831, who was the first to
publish a Dutch-Javanese dictionary (de Senerpont Domis 1827). In fact, this work
might be better classified as a phrasebook, as it consists mostly of sentences –
translated into the three Javanese speech levels – deemed useful for Dutchmen
(see Fig. 3). His idiosyncratic spelling makes it clear that he operated outside the
indological conventions of later, more academically-oriented lexicographers. An
example of the latter category is Philippus Roorda van Eysinga, a professor of
oriental languages in Breda also known for his work on Malay, who published a
Dutch-Javanese (1834) and a Javanese-Dutch (1835) dictionary.
The German missionary Gottlob Bruckner, who was employed by the
Nederlandsch Bijbelgenootschap (“Dutch Bible Society”) and sent to Java in
1814, published a vocabulary of Dutch, English, and Javanese (in original script).
This 1843 publication was the first lexicographical work accessible to an Anglo-
phone readership (see Fig. 4). His successor and compatriot Johann Gericke was
commissioned to Java in 1827 and compiled, among other things, a Javanese-Dutch
glossary. This Javanese-script wordlist was subsequently improved and
The lexicography of regional languages in Indonesia 7

Fig. 3 Hollandsch en Javaansch woordenboekje (De Senerpont Domis 1827)

supplemented by the Delft-based professor in oriental languages Taco Roorda,

assisted by his colleagues Albert Vreede and Johannes Gunning. This dictionary,
first published in 1847, is still affectively known by scholars of Javanese as
“Gericke-Roorda.” It was also the source of Pierre Favre’s Javanese-French dictio-
nary (1870), the first of its kind intended for French readers. Later editions of
8 S. Moeimam and T. Hoogervorst

Fig. 4 Een klein woordenboek der Hollandsche, Engelsche en Javaansche talen (Bruckner 1843)
The lexicography of regional languages in Indonesia 9

Gericke & Roorda (1875, 1886, 1901) incorporated numerous more entries and
became considerably more user friendly. Nevertheless, this popular dictionary
remained only accessible to those proficient in the Javanese script. Besides being
responsible for several supplements to “Gericke-Roorda,” the Dutch missionary
Pieter Jansz produced the first Dutch-Javanese pocket dictionary (1865) in
co-operation with the Bible translator Hillebrandus Klinkert. In addition, his
Javanese-Dutch dictionary in Roman character appeared in 1876 and immediately
became popular among non-academic Dutch readers (the last reprint was in 1932).
The continued need for an up-to-date and practical Javanese-Dutch dictionary
eventually gave rise to a large-scale lexicographical project spanning from 1926 to
1942 under Theodoor Pigeaud. While compiling this comprehensive dictionary,
Pigeaud decided to publish an abbreviated version in 1938, which received excellent
reviews and saw five reprints. In 1948, his pocket dictionary Javanese-Dutch/Dutch-
Javanese also saw the light. In the same year he published his Dutch-Javanese
dictionary to accompany his Javanese-Dutch dictionary of 1938, which completely
superseded the Dutch-Javanese dictionary by Jansz (Uhlenbeck 1964, pp. 62). The
comprehensive Javanese dictionary Pigeaud was commissioned to compile, how-
ever, never materialized. In 2007, Rob van Albada, head of the Foundation for
Indonesian Lexicography, expanded the macrostructure of Pigeaud’s dictionary with
6000 additional entries. The Javanese spelling has been updated according to the
latest 1991 rules. Van Albada’s additions were sourced from present-day colloquial
and written language, terms for music and dance, words from various Javanese
dialects, and vocabulary found in the nineteenth-century Serat Centhini. A second
edition of the dictionary of Van Albada and Pigeaud (2015) saw the addition of
another 13,000 entries, including terminology relating to wayang and words from
the Cirebon dialect of Javanese. As regards improvements in structure, all the main
entries have been arranged under the basic word, while derived forms are grouped as
sub-entries.
Javanese scholars, among them Tjondronegoro and Ismangoon, have made
numerous lexicographical contributions from the field’s incipient days
(cf. Uhlenbeck 1964; Teeuw 1994), yet the first Javanese bilingual dictionary
compiled by a native speaker was that of Sasrasoeganda in 1915 (reprinted in
1922). A new concise Indonesian-Javanese dictionary compiled by Poerwadarminta
appeared in 1942. This exhaustive, successful book was reprinted in 1943 and 1945,
while a pocket version appeared in 1946. A prolific lexicographer perhaps better
known for his work on Indonesian, Poerwadarminta also published an entirely
romanized monolingual Javanese dictionary in 1939, which still counts as the best
monolingual dictionary of Javanese. The large majority of the latter’s entries were
taken from Pigeaud (1938). In 1948 he published a Javanese-Indonesian dictio-
nary. Since Indonesia’s independence, Javanese remained one of the best
documented languages, second only to Malay/Indonesian. The aforementioned
Bibliografi Perkamusan Indonesia (1976) lists no less than 16 post-independence
dictionaries intended for an Indonesian readership, and many more have appeared
since. Among the most exhaustive is a 756-page Javanese-Indonesian dictionary
by Prawiroatmodjo (1957).
10 S. Moeimam and T. Hoogervorst

A Javanese-German dictionary by Hans Herrfurth was published in 1972. Two

years later, Yale University Press issued a Javanese-English dictionary by Elinor
Horne (1974), the first modern Javanese dictionary with English as the target
language. It was based on Gericke and Roorda (1901 edition), Pigeaud (1938),
and Poerwadaminta (1939), and also contained some more recent data. The latest
significant contribution to Javanese lexicography in English is the dictionary by
Stuart Robson and Singgih Wibisono (2002), which, as stated on its cover, was
intended to be a rounded and updated source of information to be used in “everyday
communication and in order to read published materials.” This dictionary is meant to
be useful to language scholars, students of Javanese history and society, and visitors
with an interest in the traditional culture. It provides clear English translations and
explanations, the definitions are brief and to the point (Wieringa 2003, pp. 455–456).
An online version can be accessed through the SEAlang website (http://sealang.net/
java/).
The documentation of regional varieties of Javanese was spearheaded by the
scholar-entrepreneur Karel Holle as early as the late-nineteenth century, although
these efforts did not give rise to any sensu stricto dictionaries. The first Javanese
dialect dictionary was of the Banten variety (Patmadiwiria 1977), published by the
Pusat Bahasa. Other Javanese varieties on which dictionaries have been published
are the dialects of Cirebon (Hidayat et al. 1992; Sudjana 2001), Banyumas (Tohari
1996, 2007), Banyuwangi (Ali 2002), and Surabaya (Djupri 2008). Outside Indo-
nesia, we find a Surinamese Javanese-Dutch dictionary compiled by Hein Vruggink
in cooperation with Sarmo (2001). No lexicographic material on the Javanese
varieties in Malaysia and New Caledonia are known to us.

Sundanese

The study of Sundanese has a considerably less ancient pedigree than Javanese. The
language was not included in the wordlist in Raffles’ aforementioned History of Java
(1817), as the author and most of his contemporaries regarded Sundanese as little
more than a Javanese dialect. The wealthy Dutch superintendent Andries de Wilde
was the first to compile lexicographical notes on Sundanese, handed over to Taco
Roorda for publication in 1841 (see Fig. 5). As mentioned previously, a Sundanese-
Malay vocabulary appeared 10 years afterwards. Yet it is the dictionary of the
English landowner Jonathan Rigg (1862) that may be regarded as the starting
point of the academic study of this language. Not long afterwards, the civil servant
Hendrik Oosting was given the task of preparing lesson materials (a grammar and
updated dictionary) required to teach Sundanese in Europe. In 1883, he completed a
dictionary so large that it became impracticable to use, as every entry was given in
romanized spelling as well as Javanese script (cacarakan). His positively received
Dutch-Sundanese dictionary came out four years later (Oosting 1887). Other lexi-
cographical studies were compiled by Bible translators, such as Gerhardus Grashuis
(1874) and Arend Geerdink (1875).
The lexicography of regional languages in Indonesia 11

Fig. 5 Nederduitsch-Maleisch en Soendasch woordenboek (De Wilde and Roorda 1841)

12 S. Moeimam and T. Hoogervorst

The most popular Sundanese-Dutch dictionary is that of the Dutch missionary

Sierk Coolsma (1884), who became the most important figure in Sundanese linguis-
tics throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His dictionary was
based on first-hand lexicographical notes supplemented with data from previous
dictionaries, such as Rigg (1862), Geerdink (1875), and Oosting (1883). In contrast
to Rigg’s dictionary, which only contained words from the Sundanese variety spoken
in the area around Bogor, the lexicon in Coolsma’s dictionary consisted of
Sundanese words from various areas in West Java. The second edition (1913) was
greatly enlarged with dialectical data. In 1911, Coolsma also published a Dutch-
Sundanese dictionary in collaboration with his fellow missionary Christian Albers.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the popular Dutch-supported publish-
ing house Balé Poestaka (“House of Literature”) played a pivotal role in the
publication of Sundanese grammars, dictionaries, and literature. Just before the
end of the Second World War, Satjadibrata, who headed the Sundanese department
of that publishing house, compiled a number of key lexicographical works. This
inexhaustible scholar was the first native speaker to take up Sundanese lexicography.
His Sundanese-Malay dictionary came out in 1944, with a second, enlarged edition
in 1950 and a third in 2011. In 1948, he published a voluminous monolingual
Sundanese dictionary which was reprinted in 1954 and 2005. One year later, he
produced a concise Indonesian-Sundanese and Sundanese-Indonesian dictionary in
one volume (1949), which saw a second edition in 1950 and a third in 1956 under the
title Kamus leutik Indonesia-Sunda djeung Sunda-Indonesia (“Small Indonesian-
Sundanese and Sundanese-Indonesian dictionary”). From the title alone it is obvious
that the author directed this dictionary to the Sundanese speech community. Besides
these publications, Satjadibrata’s Indonesian-Sundanese dictionary saw the light
in 1952.
After Indonesia’s independence, Sundanese scholars continued to compile mono-
lingual and bilingual dictionaries. The best-known monolingual dictionaries include
the Kamus umum basa Sunda (“General dictionary of Sundanese”) by the lexico-
graphical team of the Lembaga Basa Sastra Sunda (“Foundation for Sundanese
Language and Literature”) in 1975, the Kamus basa Sunda (“Sundanese dictionary”)
by R.A. Danadibrata in 2006, and the six-volume Kamus utama basa Sunda (“Main
dictionary of Sundanese”) by Panitia Kamus Yayasan Kebudayaan Rancage (“Dic-
tionary Team of the Rancage Cultural Foundation”) in the 2010s. A monolingual
dictionary specifically designed for the teaching of Sundanese in schools was
compiled by Budi R. Tamsyah in Bandung (1994). Earlier, he had also compiled a
dictionary on Sundanese speech levels (1991), complete with example sentences. Of
the Sundanese-Indonesian dictionaries, we should mention Sumantri (1985),
Tamsyah (1997), Wirasamita (2001), and Sumarsono (2001). Popular Indonesian-
Sundanese/Sundanese-Indonesian dictionaries have been published by Tamsyah
(1995) and Djajasudarma et al. (2004).
The most important modern Sundanese-Dutch dictionary was the product of an
almost life-long dedication of the Utrecht professor Fokko S. Eringa (1984). The
Sundanese documented in his dictionary is the variety spoken in Bandung and the
surrounding area, which is regarded as the standard to be used in newspapers and
The lexicography of regional languages in Indonesia 13

magazines. The macrostructure of this dictionary was sourced from Satjadibrata

(1948). Additional lexical items were compiled by the Leiden-based professor
Rudolf Kern with the assistance of T. Soemawihardja, presumably from Balé
Poestaka publications prior to 1950 (Uhlenbeck 1964, p. 21; Eringa 1984, p. vii).
Kern’s data was reorganized and revised, and the spelling was modernized. More
entries were added in co-operation with Sundanese authors who happened to be in
the Netherlands and the time of compilation. Eringa died in 1983, 1 year before his
magnum opus was published. In comparison to Coolsma’s dictionary, the list of
lexical items provided by Eringa is much longer and also contains some new words.
The errors in translation occurring in Coolsma have also been corrected, making it
the best Sundanese dictionary for those able to read Dutch.
A Sundanese-English/English-Sundanese dictionary has been compiled by Dwi
Nugroho and Surayin (2004) and a Sundanese-English-Indonesian dictionary by
T. Fatimah Djajasudarma (2010). A Sundanese-English dictionary based on data
from Eringa (1984) appeared in 2003 by R.R. Hardjadibrata. A Sundanese-Japanese
dictionary by Mikihiro Moriyama is forthcoming. To the best of our knowledge, no
substantial online dictionary or online version of an existing Sundanese dictionary
has appeared.

Madurese

The Madurese language is divided into several dialects, of which the variety of
Sumenep (on the eastern part of Madura) is considered the standard. Compared to
Javanese and Sundanese, the quantity of lexicographical works on Madurese from
colonial times up to the present has been limited. An isolated Madurese-Malay-
Javanese vocabulary, with the Madurese and Javanese words written in Javanese
script and Malay in the Latin alphabet, appeared in 1878 (Wieringa 1998, p. 443). A
similar work is kept in the British Library (MSS Malay A 3) and can be accessed
online (https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/). As mentioned previously, Madurese was
originally written in a Javanese-derived script (carakan), yet this system was partly
deficient as it could not accommodate the more complex Madurese phonology. An
official romanization was established by the Dutch government in 1918, yet the
ultimate “good and correct spelling of Madurese” (ejaan bahasa Madura yang baik
dan benar) was agreed upon as late as 2004. This was meant to be the standard
orthography used in dictionaries and textbooks, although actual practice – as always
– differs from what is prescribed by language planners.
The first scholar to take a continued interest in the lexicographical study of
Madurese was Albert Cornelis Vreede, an employee on a sugar plantation in
Pasuruan, East Java. His manual on this language was written between 1874 and
1877. Vreede believed Madurese to be a close but deviant relative of Javanese, rather
than a language in itself. Another Dutch scholar, Hendrik Kiliaan, considered
Madurese to be a separate language and introduced the first consistent romanization
for Madurese. Besides a Dutch-Madurese dictionary published in 1898, he also
compiled a two-volume Madurese-Dutch dictionary – in Javanese script – in
14 S. Moeimam and T. Hoogervorst

1904–1905, containing words from various Madurese dialects. Another important

contribution was the dictionary of Penninga and Hendriks (1913, reprinted in 1937),
who adopted a less precise spelling system based on that of Malay. From the
beginning of the 1980s, a fair number of works on Madurese have appeared by
Indonesian researchers at the Badan Bahasa, including several dictionaries from
Madurese to Indonesian and vice-versa. The best-known dictionaries directed to an
Indonesian readership were compiled by Asis Safioedin (1975), Adrian Pawitra
(2009), and Kutwa et al. (2011). Interestingly, these works adopt a diversity of
spellings and/or phonological representations, indicating that a widely accepted
Madurese orthography is still far from a fait accompli.

Future prospects

Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese are among the ten languages accorded priority
by the Indonesian government, as their number of speakers far surpasses a million
(Stokhof 2015, p. viii, quoting the Indonesian language expert Anton Moeliono). If
this is taken as the starting point, the future prospect of these languages is far brighter
than that of Indonesia’s numerous endangered languages, whose speakers often
number fewer than 10,000. Since the 1970s, regular lexicographical workshops
have been offered by the Badan Bahasa, including to staff of its local offices, to
raise the standard of expertise in language documentation and lexicography. The
Malay-derived Indonesian language (Bahasa Indonesia) has benefited most substan-
tially from these initiatives and now has free online dictionaries, synonym dictio-
naries, and a thesaurus. It may be hoped that regional languages will profit in equal
measure from these efforts and that their lexicographical and grammatical studies
will be made better accessible than they are at present.
At the moment, we may identify two major problems surrounding the lexicogra-
phy of Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, and other Indonesian languages. Foremost,
many of the most complete dictionaries are in Dutch and have not yet been updated
or translated into Indonesian or English. It is a tragic paradox that what is arguably
the world’s most comprehensive Javanese dictionary appeared in the Netherlands
around the same time that the Javanese language ceased to be taught at Leiden
University in the wake of relentless budget cuts, ending a tradition of almost one and
a half century. Second, today’s technological opportunities are not being tapped into
sufficiently. On the one hand, scanned dictionaries have been made purchasable or
freely available by HathiTrust, Archive.org, Google Books, and the libraries of
several universities, while further plans to digitalize and publish some of the
Dutch material are ongoing. These efforts are laudable. Next to important lexical
data, the colonial-era lexicographical works also contain cultural and historical
The lexicography of regional languages in Indonesia 15

information and are therefore equally useful to non-linguists. On the other, the only
interactive online dictionaries of Indonesian regional languages known to us are
those of Balinese, Bugis, and Javanese accessible through the SEAlang website,
which are based on extant printed dictionaries. Crowd-sourced and/or born-digital
lexicographical projects are in their infancy and have yet to bear their fruits.

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