With the printing of the first Sundanese book Kitab Pangadjaran Basa Soenda (The Lesson of Sundanese) in 1850, Sundanese writing entered a new era. Printing was initially undertaken by Dutch individuals, planters, missionaries, scholars, who took a serious and sincere interest in the local people. Printing was done by the government printing house Landsdrukkerij in Batavia. The population of West Java had been familiar with manuscripts, long before the first print appeared. The newly published books were more accessible than these manuscripts; a considerably wider public was reached in the end. This had far-reaching consequences which the colonizers were not able to envisage: printed books were modernizing Sundanese writing.

Schools and schoolbooks created a new type of reader and a new type of writer. They created a new public alongside the (semi-)literate audience so closely related with the oral traditions which were predominant in the Sundanese community. Print literacy also created a new form of writing in Sundanese, starting with translations of European stories, which engendered omongan, a term that was coined by the official Sundanese translator, Kartawinata, in the 1870s. Kartawinata introduced it as a new literary form. This new writing created a different relationship between the reader and the authorial voice in the text and prepared the way for silent reading. Silent reading emerged with the new kind of writing in the late nineteenth century.

This paper will first examine the contexts in which the new writing arose. Then the new prose writing, omongan, will be put in focus in order to clarify how silent reading emerged in the oral-oriented Sundanese community.