Hasan Ali

Hasan Ali (7 December 1933 – 14 June 2010) was an Indonesian artist and language activist from Banyuwangi Regency, East Java. He is best known for his promotion of the Osing language, considering it as a separate language from Javanese and advocating for its adoption in Banyuwangi. He published a dictionary for the language in 2002.

Early life Hasan Ali was born on 7 December 1933 in the village of Mangir, in what is today Rogojampir district of Banyuwangi Regency. He was of mixed Madurese–Osing–Pakistani descent. He completed his highschool in 1956 in Malang, and studied law at Brawijaya University there. Due to lack of funds, he did not complete his law degree.

Career At age 15, Ali had founded a performing arts group which performed the story of Damar Wulan. He was appointed to the municipal council (DPRD) of the regency as an artists' representative within the Indonesian National Party, serving between 1955 and 1966.

Ali began work on an Osing–Indonesian dictionary in 1978, initially collecting vocabulary from day-to-day conversations in Banyuwangi and in migrant Osing communities nearby. He compiled the dictionary on a typewriter, though he later received a computer as a grant from Japan's Toyota Foundation through a researcher's recommendation. He advocated for the Osing language to be incorporated into textbooks and for the language to be formally codified.

After Ali's participation in the in 1991 and 1996, where he advocated Osing language education, the Ministry of Education and Culture approved the inclusion of Osing in Banyuwangi's school curriculums. In the 1996 congress, Ali used seven sentences in Osing which were nonintelligible with Javanese to support his claim of the languages' separation. He completed his dictionary and published it in 2002, Ali died on 14 June 2010 at Fatimah Islamic Hospital in Banyuwangi due to diabetes and hypertension.