Missionary linguistics in the East Indies in the seventeenth century

Christopher Joby
University Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS, University of London | School of History, University of East Anglia
Abstract

In recent years, there has been increased academic interest in missionary linguistics. However, whereas much has been written on Spanish missionary linguistics, above all in the Americas, relatively little has been published on Dutch missionary linguistics. This article aims to address this situation by analyzing the texts written in Malay by Dutch missionary linguists in the seventeenth century in the East Indies, now Indonesia. It begins by providing an account of the history of the Malay language, focusing above all on the influence of other languages including Sanskrit, Arabic, and Portuguese on the Malay lexicon. It then describes the activities of the Dutch East India Company in the Indonesian archipelago. After providing a comprehensive account of the texts that the Dutch missionary linguists wrote in Malay, the article analyzes the linguistic strategies that they employed as they attempted to overcome the gap between their language and culture and the Malay language and the culture in which it was embedded. It does so using a fourfold typology: loanwords, loan translations or calques; periphrasis and conceptual transfer. The picture that emerges is that authors made extensive use of all four strategies to communicate the Christian Gospel in Malay. One interesting result is that Dutch missionary linguistics used very few Dutch loanwords in their Malay texts. The article analyzes possible reasons for this.

Publication history

Date received: 24 February 2023

Date accepted: 25 October 2023

Published online: 9 January 2024

Table of contents

In 1596, the first Dutch fleet, commanded by Cornelis de Houtman (1565–1599), reached Bantam on Java. By 1609, the Dutch East India Company (VOC, founded in 1602), had gained control of several of the Maluku Islands or Moluccas. Ten years later, in 1619, it finally secured a trading post on Java at Jayakarta, which it re-named Batavia. This settlement would function as the capital in Asia of the VOC until it ceased trading in 1799. Thereafter, it was the capital of the Dutch East Indies (Nederlands-Indië).

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