BASA BALI ( Balinese Language )

 

 kecak dance the Balinese pride in Uluwatu Temple,

PART of Bali’s inscrutability, and much of its charm, comes from its difficult language, Basa Bali. Few foreigner can understand it, and not all Balinese can speak it perfectly.  Most Balinese will tell you that they can barely speak it at all. That’s being coy: Balinese is the mother tongue of most Balinese people. It’s the language of daily life, which famously includes a big component of religious practice, local law, and artistic production, all of which is conducted in Balinese. 

More or less. There is a lot of concern about how Balinese can survive among a few million speakers under the dominance of the national language, bahasa Indonesia. Many young Balinese children living in towns now speak Indonesian to each other. Is the Balinese language in trouble

Balinese is a rich language with its own script and complex literary forms. It is also extraordinarily expressive. It can coo like a dove or grind like a garbage truck. Its range, and central difficulty, comes from its preoccupation with differences in rank, arising from Bali’s Hindu caste system. There are parallel vocabularies to distinguish the rank of the speakers and their relation to each other and to the people of whom they are speaking. A mistake in observing any of these distinctions by using the wrong word may be felt as an insult. Imagine, for example, that you are an elderly lady, and a stranger comes up and cheerfully shouts, “ hi there, you old bag!”  the same effect may result if a Balinese chooses the wrong word for, say, “water”

Caste has been a sensitive issue in Bali since the time of colonial rule, when the Dutch hardened caste divisions and gave privileges to the upper castes. In the Bali of modern, egalitarian Indonesia, some of the pressure on the Balinese language stems from a growing feeling that caste distinctions are obsolete.

But there is much else steering Balinese- speakers to Bahasa Indonesia. The press and the education system  use  Indonesian.  Balinese who wish to participate in national discourse write in Indonesian. The human urge for progress creates a dilemma for Balinese who want to be part of modern life and still preserve their traditions, which are held to be vitally precious. Besides, the tourism industry creates an economic incentive for Balinese to learn English and other foreign languages. It is natural that many .

But the most interesting development is “ kidung interaktif”  in which people call up radio station and sing Balinese poetry over the phone.

This arises from the tradition of mabebasan, or literary recitation. Until recently, this was normally conducted by a small group of elderly men, for their own pleasure at someone’s home group of elderly men, for their own pleasure at someone’s home or as part of as part of a religious ceremony. One person would sing a line of poetry, and another would interpret the line in Balinese in a highly stylized manner. After a while they might swap roles.

This very exacting practice – at which you’d never see a tourist –requires a number of skills besides being able to sing: one must be able to read Balinese script, understand old Javanese, and know the numerous metres of the literary genres (kekawin, kidung, and geguritan ). In the case of kekawin, one must also know old Javanese (kawi) ; kidung is written in middle Javanese or Balinese, and geguritan is usually written in Balinese.

In kidung interaktif, anyone may ring up the radio ( or television) station and sing a bit of Balinese poetry. The host at the station performs the interpretation. Otherwise, the same literary exigencies apply but there is another important difference: the callers are also women and young people, and they are from all sorts of background : “farmers, money lenders, civil servants, school teachers, housewives, pensioners, retired police, petty traders, small scale entrepreneurs, shop owners, hotel owners and their employees, unemployed people and many others.. “moreover, they often sing their own compositions.

Kidung interaktif is wildly popular- so much so that, not long after it was introduced by the state radio station RRI Denpasar in 1991, there were so many callers that different towns in Bali were assigned specific days on which people could phone in. broadcast time went from half an hour a week to up to four hours a day Monday through Saturday. Presently there are fifteen different kidung interaktif programs on a dozen radio stations. And the practice has spread to Bali’s there television stations. All this suggest that Balinese is thriving in what is becoming a multilingual society.