Batak languages

The missionaries initially hoped that their printed Bible would unite the Bataks as Luther s had the Germans, despite the mutual unintelligibility of some Batak languages. This succeeded, however, only for those we now call Toba Batak, to the west and south of Lake Toba in North Tapanuli. Distinct Simalungun and Karo Batak identities were determined by a very different language (in the Karo case), and by the... 

Indonesian exclusively in the towns, while even the ethnie churches cannot hold the line on the use of Batak languages. They know they cannot hold young people unless they offer services in Indonesian, and the complete transfer to the national language in urban parishes seems only a matter of time. 

The Batak and the Kadazan/Dusun, discussed in chapters 6 and 7, are among the more coherent and effective of the once stateless groups now making their way in independent modern states. It should be remembered that dozens of other language groups have been wholly absorbed... 

For many centuries the Bataks perceived no collective identity, as each lineage and valley was separately organised. They spoke a wide spectrum of local dialects, comprehensible to those in adjacent valleys but not to those further away. The northern Batak dialects (today s Karo and Dairi) were part of a different and mutually incomprehensible language family from the southern (today s Toba, Mandailing and Angkola), with Simalungun another intermediate category. Those Bataks who identified most closely with the states of the coast, Aceh in the north or Deli,... 

The term Batak appears even earlier in Chinese sources, but as a polity rather than a people. Chau Ju-kua (1970) has an obscure reference to Bo-ta as connected with Sriwijaya, while the Yuan (Mongol) dynastic chronicle mentions Ma-da next to Samudra (Pasai), both offering tribute to the imperial court in 1285-6. Ma-da would be pronounced Ba-ta in Hokkien, the likely language of trader informants.2... 

The Rhenisch mission to the Toba Batak succeeded in part because as a German body it was conceptually separate from Dutch colonialism, and indeed preceded colonial control in the Toba Batak heartland. Between 1860 and 1900 the majority of Toba Bataks accepted Christianity, in a form which centred around the printed Batak versions of the Augsburg Confession and the Bible. Although there were areas of great tension between Batakness and Christianity, the second generation of Christians was able to conceive the uniform style of worship, belief and church governance developed by the Rhenisch mission as a part of the Batak identity, and the language used by the mission as a classic form of Batak expression. In 1927 the mission was reconstituted as a Batak church, the HKBP. 

Those we now call Karo or Karo Batak were declared an objective of Dutch missionary work for political reasons, because of their proximity to the Muslim and anti-Dutch Acehnese (Kipp 1990). The expansion of the Rhenisch mission in that direction was therefore not encouraged by colonial authority, the work being entrusted to the Dutch Missionary Society (NZG). Karos appear to have accepted the broad exonym Batak in the nineteenth century, but the Dutch mission favoured a distinctive term, to reflect the very different language in which they preached, to cater to Karo sensitivity to Toba domination, and to emphasise that the German mission should keep out of its sphere (Kipp 1993 28-38 Steedly 1996). 

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