PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

The Indonesian politics of the national language has long been overshadowed by the interests of the dominant elites and it has tended to serve the ideologies of the power holders. Decisions regarding the national language policy are made top-down and ignore the ideologies of the grassroots people. In the name of the language slogan, " Bahasa Indonesia sebagai bahasa pemersatu bangsa (the Indonesian language as the nation's unifying language)", the country's language policy and planning has ardently been promoting Indonesian as the national language, but puts the heritage languages in danger of extinction. In this article, discussion will focus on conflicts over language preferences and assessment of their significance for the development and modernisation of the Indonesian language. This paper will also emphasises on the fact that the conflict is difficult to resolve due to the pluralist dilemma. Despite this dilemma, minority language speakers are able to take the initiatives to exercise their agency, reconstruct their identities and maintain their home languages. They use their heritage languages to appropriate and resist dominant languages. In this paper, such a practice is referred to as grassroots performativity.