A Norm Called Written Multilingualism

Representing linguistic richness in public writing

A multilingual label in a JYSK’s product. Photo by Tjahaja.

I went to JYSK—a retail store known as the Danish IKEA—to accompany my friend looking for pillows for his new studio apartment.

As I strolled between aisles, a product label for a satin sheet captured my attention. It was just a normal piece of sturdy paper with a wall of text on it. But it wasn’t the mere bulk of letters that was appealing to me.

The fact that it was a list of more than twenty languages describing the product dilated my pupils. It excited me!

Written multilingualism

I had never seen such rich written multilingualism—the use of many languages in writing—on any product label back in my home country, Indonesia. For me, any public text in three languages was already an event, so one with more than twenty languages was unthinkable.

A multilingual monument in Kalamata Square, Greece. It’s surprising to me that the monument also carves a Javanese word “Kamardikan” (freedom) on it. Photo by Tjahaja.

A product label in Indonesia is normally monolingual, in Indonesian. Only sometimes is it bilingual in Indonesian and English or Indonesian and a local language—which is not a dialect! The root of this, I think, comes from the linguistic norm…