The Politics of Borrowed Words: Why Indonesian Teenagers Hurt in English

Indonesian teenagers aren’t short of words for distress. They’re borrowing English because it carries a political force their own institutions do not.

When Indonesian teenagers talk about their mental health, they increasingly do so in English. This is not a linguistic necessity. Bahasa Indonesia has precise and powerful equivalents for the terms they prefer: kelelahan captures exhaustion and burnout; tertekan conveys the weight of depression; kewalahan maps cleanly onto overwhelmed. The vocabulary exists.

So why aren't they using it?

The standard explanations foreground stigma, the absence of services, or the communication gap between generations. These are real. The 2022 Indonesia National Adolescent Mental Health Survey, a nationally representative study of nearly 8,000 adolescents across all 34 provinces, found that only 2.6% of those with a diagnosed disorder had accessed formal mental health services in the past year. Indonesia has roughly 0.3 psychiatrists per 100,000 people, well below the global average. Basically, the infrastructure for addressing distress barely exists. But these facts explain the treatment gap. They do not explain the linguistic choice itself: why hybrid phrases like mentalku drop and borrowed terms like burnt out and trauma have spread so rapidly through Indonesian youth culture online when serviceable local alternatives exist, and the answer is political rather than clinical.

In Anglo cultures, therapeutic vocabulary is not merely descriptive. It is a power technology. Over several decades, terms like burnout, trauma and anxiety have migrated from clinical settings into common usage, carrying institutional claims with them. To say "I am burnt out" in a British or American workplace is to make an argument that the institution which produced this condition is obliged to address it. The language shifts the locus of responsibility from the individual to the system, potentially compelling accommodation, triggering formal processes, or at least reframing personal failure as institutional negligence. Students invoke it against schools. Employees invoke it against employers. In short, it has genuine leverage. This was the product of specific cultural and legal developments: the growth of occupational health frameworks, the influence of therapy culture on middle-class life, the gradual institutionalisation of psychological concepts in HR, education and law, and so on. Indonesia's institutional culture has not made this pivot. The dominant framework, shaped by Javanese-inflected elite norms and reinforced through decades of New Order governance, places the burden of composure on the individual. Distress is a private matter to be managed quietly, not a systemic product that generates obligations for schools or employers. This is not so much a failure of vocabulary, as bahasa has rich emotional registers, but a question of what the vocabulary is authorised to do. Conversely, English therapeutic terms carry, ready-made, an institutional expectation that the local language cannot. When Indonesian youth import them, they are less translating than borrowing the accountability framework that comes attached. What's funny is that this mechanism is neither new, nor uniquely Indonesian. After the Norman Conquest, Old English had a perfectly serviceable word for mercy: mildheortness, or "mild-heartedness," attested in devotional and biblical contexts, naming a disposition of the heart, an inward softness made visible. The Normans, however, brought mercy, from Anglo-French and ultimately the Latin merces, which carried heavy connotations wages, payment and remission.

The word arrived pre-loaded with a juridical architecture — pardon flowing downward from sovereign to supplicant. English didn't import mercy because it lacked a concept. It imported it because the borrowed word was better suited to the new regime of theology and power: it could operate simultaneously in law, kingship, lordship and penance in ways mildheortness simply couldn't. The doctrine stayed the same in nominal terms while the institutional atmosphere changed entirely. A more recent version of the same move occurred in postwar Japan. Japanese had meiwaku, a rich word for the inconvenience or trouble one causes others, carrying strong social obligation to avoid it. What it lacked was a corresponding term for the individual's claim against intrusion. When puraibashī arrived as a loanword from English (privacy) in the 1960s, it didn't fill a semantic gap so much as smuggle in an entire rights-based framework for which Japanese institutional culture had no native infrastructure. The word imported the claim before the institutions existed to hear it and it took decades of legal pressure, much of it driven by the word's own implicit logic, before anything resembling enforceable privacy rights emerged. In brief, the borrowing preceded and arguably helped produce the institutional change. What travels in a borrowed word here is not primarily meaning but an expectation: a theory of what institutions owe, what redress looks like, and who has standing to demand it. And in Indonesia, the borrowing is not restricted to mental health. Indonesian youth have quietly developed a multi-language toolkit, selecting source languages according to the specific power each carries. Bahasa Anak Jaksel, the hybrid English-Indonesian register associated with South Jakarta's educated middle class, is a marker of cosmopolitan capital, signalling access to international education and global networks that formal Bahasa Indonesia cannot confer. Korean borrowings from Hallyu culture serve a different purpose. Terms like oppa, unnie and daebak import an imaginary of aesthetic sophistication, a counter-prestige that positions the speaker outside both the domestic hierarchy and American-dominated global culture. English therapeutic vocabulary operates as a third register entirely, importing institutional accountability. What this suggests is that these young people are not confused about language. They have mapped the power topography of the languages available to them and learned to move between registers the way a diplomat moves between jurisdictions, knowing which rules apply where, and which language makes which kinds of claims stick. This is not code-switching in the linguist's neutral sense but a workaround for a domestic institutional language that has less capacity to make demands. This need not imply conscious strategy. The political scientist James Scott observed that subordinated groups have always found ways to make claims against dominant power through disguised, deniable, everyday acts, such as linguistic tricks, euphemisms and feigned compliance, without needing to articulate what they were doing or why. The behaviour is politically intelligible without being politically intentional. What's new is the infrastructure: Scott's Malaysian peasants had no mechanism to coordinate their hidden transcripts at scale. Indonesian teenagers, 98% of whom are online, do.

The same infrastructure that allowed these registers to spread at scale also exposed them. When borrowing becomes powerful enough to threaten, it attracts a response, and the responses dare to name what the borrowings are really doing. The cosmopolitan English register attracted a counter-reaction through the #KaburAjaDulu phenomenon, "just escape first", which went viral in 2025 as young Indonesians openly expressed a desire to seek better opportunities abroad, coinciding with public anger over education budget cuts and rising layoffs. Youth unemployment had reached 16% by mid-2025, more than triple the national average.

The backlash this provoked revealed what had always been latent in the register itself: that performing cosmopolitan fluency was not merely aesthetic self-positioning but a rehearsal for departure. To speak the language of elsewhere was already, in some sense, to have left. The charge levelled at KaburAjaDulu adherents — betrayal, ingratitude, the squandering of a state-funded education on foreign citizenship — was really a charge against the entire register. The vocabulary had been the thin end of the wedge all along. The response to a South Korean incident was still more revealing. In early 2026, following a DAY6 concert in Kuala Lumpur, a localised dispute over a fan's camera use escalated into racist attacks by Korean netizens who mocked Southeast Asians' appearance and economic conditions. Users across the region counter-attacked under the #SEAblings hashtag. The episode cracked open the terms on which Korean cultural prestige had been available to borrow. It turned out to be a loan, not a transfer — accessible so long as Indonesian youth remained admirers and consumers, and revocable if they dared to assert themselves as equals. Together these episodes confirm the core argument from without. If borrowing foreign registers were merely aesthetic, that is as a question of style or generational fashion, neither backlash would carry such heat. The shame campaigns serve to register that something more than vocabulary is being moved: power is being claimed and those claims are being contested. Jakarta's response has been characteristically institutional. It announced a social media ban for under-16s from March 28, becoming the first country in Southeast Asia to do so, following Australia. The official rationale covers addiction, cyberbullying and pornography but the timing and target suggest an attempt is also being made to reclaim sovereignty over the infrastructure these borrowed registers travel on.