Statehood, Scale and Hierarchy

Just brilliant. Zentz’s analysis is admirably nuanced, fresh and challenging. Her insight compels us to radically reconsider the familiar notions of social identity, institutionalised power, and the politics of languaging in a world dominated by English.

* Ariel Heryanto, Monash University, Australia *

Lauren Zentz uses sophisticated theory and methods to offer highly accessible, yet incredibly nuanced insights into the relationships between language and globalization. The book offers a brilliant account of university students’ ideologies about Indonesian, Javanese, and English, and how these ideologies are mediated by other language ideologies from diverse, constantly changing, and hierarchically organized scales. Zentz has written an instant classic that will secure a space on reading lists for a long time to come.

* Zane Goebel, La Trobe University, Australia *

Zentz’s rigorous scholarship presents a powerful, fine-grained, richly detailed, ethnographically insightful, and theoretically compelling study of language practices and policies situated in the complex web of social, historical, and political dynamics of local, national and global forces in contemporary Indonesia.

* Perry Gilmore, The University of Arizona, USA *

In this powerfully written book, Lauren Zentz presents both a sociolinguistic ethnography and a sociolinguistic ethnohistory of shifting language positionalities in Indonesia. Against a backdrop of postcoloniality and globalization, she shows how ideology and access work to scale and re-scale linguistic ecologies and communicative repertoires, as languages are “created” and hierarchized in the context of nation-building. Eminently readable, this engaging account charts important new ground in critical applied linguistics and the ethnography of language policy.

* Teresa L. McCarty, University of California, Los Angeles, USA *

This is a remarkable monograph. Zentz has managed to paint a picture of language
life in contemporary multilingual Indonesia while showing us just how it in many
ways reflects the ideological effects of historical events, some long past and others
less so.

-- Lionel Wee, National University of Singapore, Singapore * Language Policy (2018) 17 *

Zentz’s “Statehood, Scale and Hierarchy: History, Language and Identity” is an exceptionally insightful ethnographic study exploring the tension between postcoloniality, nationalism and globalisation and its impacts on linguistic patterns in Central Java and Indonesia.

-- Magdalena Hackl, Universität Innsbruck, Austria * LINGUIST List 29.3947 *

Statehood, Scale and Hierarchy is highly recommended to scholars working on language policy and planning, the role of English in postcolonial states, and the
relation between discourses and practices around named languages.

-- Camille Jacob, University of Portsmouth, UK * Language in Society Vol. 47, Issue 1, February 20