Old Javanese (Kawi)
Language Melayu-Polinesia
Documented only
Other and rejected name forms
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The earliest recorded stage of Javanese, the language of kakawin poetry and inscriptions in Java between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, which ceased to be spoken in Java and whose use continued in Bali to the present as the language of manuscripts and performance.
A language that did not die elsewhere
Kawi ceased to be a written language in Java after Majapahit, and its manuscripts survive largely not in Java but in Bali and Lombok, where palm-leaf copying continued unbroken. It is for this reason that the Old Javanese texts known today reach us through Balinese copies, and for the same reason that most of the manuscripts held at Leiden came from the spoils of the military expedition to Lombok in 1894.
In Bali the language did not become an object of study but kept working: it is read aloud and construed into Balinese before an audience in mabebasan, and it is used by puppeteers. The difference between a language that is preserved and one that is used is plain when the two situations are set side by side.
Kakawin and its language
Kakawin use Indian metres counting long and short syllables, something Javanese does not have, and which was therefore adopted together with a very large Sanskrit vocabulary. The grammar nonetheless remained wholly Austronesian: Kawi is not a mixed language but Javanese with a thick borrowed layer and a foreign system of versification.
The reading that equates Kawi with Sanskrit, or calls it a “sacred language”, still circulates in popular writing. No source supports it: Kawi was a literary and administrative language, used for land charters as much as for verse.
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