The transregional and inter-Asian turns in Asian studies have overtaken Indonesian studies’ earlier preoccupation with the question of Java's modernization and the nation-state. Departing from its Java-centricity, and casting their frame more widely across the region, scholars have turned creatively to genealogies, laws, and religious texts to reveal radically different modalities of sovereignty, piety, and cosmopolitanisms. The nimble juxtaposition of Sanskritic, Arabic, and Pali texts with their Javanese, Malay, and Tamil counterparts has allowed scholars to make important breakthroughs in the historiography of transregional Asia over the long duration.1 If the potential interpretative payoff for such translingual historiographical work is clear, the linguistic hurdle is nevertheless just as daunting.Tom Hoogervorst's Language Ungoverned is the latest addition to this expanding corpus of linguistically inflected transregional and interdisciplinary histories, and the first with a Sinitic focus. Although ostensibly an ethnolinguistic history of an Indonesian minority group, the author situates his cast of actors, the entrepreneurial creole Chinese print entrepreneurs and reading publics, within the broader canvas of linguistic interactions between Southern China and the Malay-Javanese world. The commercialized Sino-Malay print culture that flourished in the first half of twentieth-century Dutch colonial Batavia (Jakarta), Semarang, and Surabaya, he shows, cannot be understood apart from colonial ethnographic Eurocentric knowledge projects, new modern experiments emerging from the Chinese homeland since the 1910s, and print, linguistic, political, and consumerist developments occurring simultaneously among other Peranakan Chinese in Singapore, Penang, and Medan.Over a breathtaking sweep of space and time, the author, in chapters 1 and 2, unfolds the history of linguistic contact between the southern Chinese and the Malay world since the fifteenth century. He shows that from at least the 1400s, Malay had served as the lingua franca of encounters on both the southern China coast and in the Malay-Javanese world. In speech, a “Low” or “Bazaar” Malay emerged among the Chinese (and other resident alien groups), in counterdistinction with the “High” Malay of the colonial and Malay polities. This pidgin language was rendered further diverse by frequent “lexical borrowing and code-mixing involving Hokkien, Dutch, Javanese, and/or Sundanese... and other Sinitic languages” (72). Creole Chinese writing mirrored their hybridized spoken language giving rise to what the author calls an “orthographical Babel” in their print culture (70).The story of Sino-Malay print entrepreneurialism begins proper in chapter 3. Situating it at the “crossroads of intra-Asian connections and technological advancements,” the author traces its emergence and success to its capacity to thrive on “its diversity” (79). These print entrepreneurs “engaged in journalism, translation, newspaper editing, fiction writing, and the printing and publication of books” (79). Between the 1880s and 1940s, they delivered to the hungry Chinese-Indonesian reading public whatever was deemed salable—stories about sex and vice, traditional Chinese tales, international news, Chinese nationalism, and advertisements for the latest fashions and consumer items. The only element that remained consistent was the ungovernable diversity of the hybridized Sino-Malay language and speech.The final two chapters (4 and 5) unpack the competing expressions of material culture and linguistic norms of the Chinese-Indonesians between the 1910s and 1930s. In chapter 4, Hoogervorst reveals how Chineseness was in flux through debates, often misogynistically targeting Dutch-educated Chinese women, about attire, medicine, and cuisine. In the final and most original chapter of the book, the author draws out the “humoristic and the invective” in the use of language and speech forms in the Sino-Malay vernacular press. By zooming in on how writers made use of “a vast array of imitating, lampooning, punning, swearing, and other manifestations of translingual creativity,” the author shows how the repressed linguistic community continued to bicker among themselves, even as they took potshots against the colonial racial hierarchy (126).Claudine Salmon's foundational Literature in Malay by the Chinese of Indonesia: A Provisional Annotated Bibliography made clear, in a shocking way, the extent to which the volume of Sino-Malay print culture far exceeded what the colonial literacy promotion agency, Balai Pustaka, was producing contemporaneously.2 Yet, until Hoogervorst's Language Ungoverned, it was often difficult to grasp Sino-Malay print culture's historical and cultural significance in more concise terms. This book's brilliance lies in the author's insistence on telling the story of Sino-Malay print culture in its widest possible framing, not only as a product of and for Indonesia but also as a network of connections across Southeast Asia and other Asian regions beyond.In his closing epilogue, the author champions the view that Sino-Malay print culture ought to be accepted as “an important historical monument” for the Indonesian nation-state. This is already happening, as postauthoritarian Indonesia has reembraced, in fits and starts, creolized Chineseness as one of its patchwork of minority cultures. Language Ungoverned is a timely reminder, from the bottom up, of the cosmopolitan and regionalist orientation of everyday Indonesian society.Students of Asian societies will agree with Hoogervorst that “(a)ccess to (Asian) primary sources is a global concern” (159–60). One understated highlight of the book is the fact that it draws from the wealth of archival collections housed in the author's home institutions: The Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) and Leiden University. Leiden now holds the most complete collection of Indonesian Sino-Malay print materials in the world. As we heed the author's call to preserve and digitize Asian primary sources of historical value, we should also look seriously at the example he and his institution have set for us.