Circumstances that should have been under my control have been keeping me from materials I gathered in Java in 1985-86, which I am just starting to think about as parts of some fine-grained descriptions I want to write of Javanese uses of Javanese and Indonesian. This paper is concerned with sociohistorical background for understanding usage in Java now, and especially with Javanese understandings of their ethnic and national languages. I borrow from and improvise with two different paradigms here to thematize issues which will later be backgrounded to use of Javanese and Indonesian--life's linguistic imponderibilia, Malinowski might say--as referential tools, mediators of social interaction, and markers of contextually relevant social identities. I foist few linguistic particulars on the reader and, by the same token, risk some ethnographic flatness to dwell more on expository strategies with which I am experimenting than the kinds of texts they will later serve to contextualize.

The goal is to describe schematically the shifting institutional bases of valorization of Indonesian and Javanese: how language-related values have been propagated, assumed, and interactionally invoked by members of geosocially different kinds of Javanese speech communities over eighty years or so of rapid social change. Since I have written elsewhere about traditional elite usage I try here to foreground the rural side of this situation, drawing from research during six months in a Javanese village. But to describe villagers' changing understandings of Javanese and Indonesian communities, language-related institutions, social authority, and power, I cannot avoid talking about their relations to and views of cities. These are joined linguistic and social issues crucial for a study of a new national language's dissemination and assimilation in a new-yet-old Javan/Indonesian landscape.

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