Does influencer grammar matter?
Instagram account @englishbusters calls out Indonesians for word use
Cindy Cendana, an Indonesian beauty influencer, simply wanted to know if any of her followers had been to the Japanese city of Himeji. So she posted the question — “Hand’s up, who’s been to #Himeji, Japan?” — on Instagram, along with a photo of herself in a blue dress.
Cendana could have anticipated a number of comments — restaurant recommendations, tips about visiting the feudal castle there — but certainly not this one: “If you put an apostrophe after ‘hand,’ it either means ‘hand is’ or something that belongs to the hand. In this case, it should be ‘hands’ as you’re referring to multiple hands.” (The post no longer appears in Cendana’s feed.)
She wrote in a text message that she still remembers when she first saw the comment in February: “I was surprised, but happy at the same time because I had my clumsiness corrected for me.”
The comment came from the anonymous Instagram account @englishbusters, which calls out Indonesian influencers for bungling English grammar on social media. Its provocative posts — which include forensic, crass dissections of captions like “wanna coffee?” and “Why choosing between yoga and fashion when you can have them both?” — have divided Indonesian social media and news media. Its followers appreciate its direct, confrontational tone; its detractors lament its snark and feel that its very premise borders on public shaming.
@englishbusters follows a broader trend of calling out influencers for their antics, whether it’s desecrating American public lands or displaying general social entitlement. The account also has a lexicological precedent: it opened up shop a couple of years after a notorious Facebook page called “Singaporean Influencers and Bloggers Write ____ English and Are Annoying AF” lit up Singapore, Indonesia’s neighbouring country.
Just as on other continents, the business of influence has flourished in Asia. Social media marketing company Socialbakers reported that Instagram #sponcon in Asia had increased by 189 per cent since last year. But does anyone care whether those posts include spelling and grammatical errors?
Dennis Toh, a marketing and design lecturer at the Management Development Institute of Singapore and a founder of the Influencer Network, an agency with offices in Singapore, argues that language matters. “When you are linguistically strong, that is an advantage,” he said. “To put a point across, good grammar is a basic requirement.”
The Influencer Network, Toh said, doesn’t strictly review the syntax of influencer posts upon receiving briefs from brands; most of them write well, anyway. But Okto Rohyadi, account manager of Jakarta-based marketing company Glitzmedia, said that grammar doesn’t matter as much as voice, be it in English or Indonesian. “It does come down to how the influencers usually talk,” he said.
Nelly Martin-Anatias, a lecturer at the School of Language and Culture at New Zealand’s Auckland University of Technology, said Indonesians still treat English as a foreign language, instead of a second one. “There is a tendency for Indonesians in big cities to codeswitch between Indonesian and English,” she said. “There is an ideology baked in the English language that it’s the cool language, the successful language.”
Why is English common among Indonesian influencers, though? “Language is the primary marked code to show or manipulate our identities. That’s why English is common in the marketing world here,” Martin-Anatias said.
Cendana, asked whether she feels responsible to educate her followers, gave a short answer: “Yes.”
The long answer? “Much like actors, politicians, entrepreneurs, what they say should have positive ramifications. Everyone is capable of influencing everybody. Gone are the days you put someone on a pedestal,” Toh said.