Hello, now it's another karaoke recording from me and little Kobold.
Singing our traditional song is one of the mediums I use to introduce the Javanese culture to my little princess.
I don't expect much that she would be able to save some Javanese vocabularies in her memory, because teaching her to be just a bilingual child is not an easy task already.
I'd be happy enough if she could speak the proper German and Bahasa Indonesia well enough before she goes to school.
But I hope that at least our Javanese culture is not gonna be too unfamiliar to her.
It's just so unfortunate that many precious old cultures from many different folks around the world are endangered either by extreme modernisation or by war.
So it would be great if my daughter could help preserving at least one of them.
Many young Javaneses living in big city couldn't even speak proper Javanese anymore.
(I mean the Javanese language for speaking with respected person, the formal one.
Javanese language has 5 big groups/levels, and to be more precise... this groups could be divided again into 13 levels. It's already a really great achievement for youngsters these days if they manage to master 2 levels. :-D
When I was a child I was able to master 3 levels cos some of my family members were traditional art performers.
Now I'm not really sure since there is practically no one to speak with LOL. Now I might be only confident to speak 2 levels of Javanese language: the low level one to speak with normal friends and the formal one.
But perhaps I still at least can understand the 3rd level too, since I still can follow the narration in a traditional oper or puppet shows for example. The complete levels of Javanese language might nowadays only be spoken by noble families and workers in the Yogyakarta and Surakarta palaces).
This is a link where you can read more about javanese language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javanese_language
However this english version of the article would tend to elaborate the javanese language category according to it's state in the present situation.
One could say that every single Indonesians generally speak at least 2 languages, those who go to school would be able to speak at least 3 languages. So being poliglot for Indonesians is not really that special, at least for those who go to school and study properly.
If one happens to be an Indonesian of chinese origin, it's even possible that one would speak 4-5 languages cos one might be taught a chinese dialect and standard mandarin by one's parent too aside of the local folks language, bahasa Indonesia and English from the school.
I love learning languages, so I really hope that my baby has inherited my interest and talent in this subject. _
It would definitely more advantageous to be able to speak as many languages as possible.
The world is big and the border between countries would play less and less role in the future.
The conservatives may try to suppress it as they like but this development... the globalisation is unstoppable.
Like it or not, the exchange of human ressources and goods between nations would be even greater in the future.
People who still love to spoil their xenophobia might laugh now but definitely would cry later, because they're only trying to deceive them selves with the memory of glory from the past. _
Well... now let's just enjoy the song.
The title is "Kangen", means: "Longing", the song was released by "Evie Tamala" at 1998.
This is the original video from her performance at 1998:
My video is at DLive