MAINTAINING JAVANESE LANGUAGE AND CULTURE TO SUPPORT CHARACTER EDUCATION IN GLOBALIZATION ERA33

Abstract

In their daily life, Javanese society uses Javanese as a means of communication. However, because of the rapid development of communication and information technology and social needs to communicate in globalization era, Javanese societies tend to use Indonesian instead of Javanese. The result of the research by Eko Kuntarto (1999) shows that the number of Javanese speakers reduces 3.36% and that of Indonesian speakers increases 3.26%. It shows that the number of Javanese speakers decreases. The young Javanese societies (under 25 years) start to leave Javanese. The tendency to use Indonesian instead of Javanese appears in the communication among Javanese living in the cities and then those living in villages, especially the young generations. The phenomena happen because of the increasing number of bilingual Javanese-Indonesian speakers and the decrease of their consciousness and understanding of the values, cooperation, and politeness in Javanese language and culture. Many values of character education are covered in Javanese language and culture. Sindu Galba and Sumintarsih (1991: 35) mention the Javanese levels including: very polite, polite, and friendship. Sunarjo (2009: 10) states ”... the Javanese guided by Javanese culture really pay attention to the cooperative and politeness principles. The Javanese is also used to express the aesthetic feeling and as a means to transfer cultural values. The Javanese usually think of the other needs before thinking of theirs. Cooperative attitude, respecting each others, and helping each others appear in their daily life. It is line with policy maxim (Leech, 1993: 206-207) to sacrifice personal benefit for someone else’s benefits. The result of a research conducted by Eko Kuntarto (1999) reveals that politeness in Javanese society is motivated by two norms to separate humans’ right and responsibility. The two norms are cooperative and respective principles. The cooperative principle requires the Javanese not to make conclict and respective priciple requires the Javanese to show respective attitude in talking to the others. Considering the important role of Javanese language and culture in character education and building, the Javanese language and culture should be maintained by using the following ways: (1) Javanese is included in the school curriculum becasue most of the students cannot use Javanese appropriately and even think that Javanese is more difficult than English; (2) using Javanese as the only vehicle in teaching Javanese subject as English is used in teaching English subject; (3) giving homeworks to the students to create Javanese dialogues or write essays in Javanese; (4) using Javanese in their daily life in the Javanese family and society; and (5) maintaining Javanese culture as what is done by the civil servants in Solo who wear Javanese uniform on Thursdays and those in Karanganyar who speak Javanese on Wednesdays.