This article focuses on one aspect of processes of enregisterment in Indonesia, namely the ways in which institutional representations of language use formulate semiotic registers linking language use to performable social categories of personhood and relationship. I examine three types of institutional and thus authorized speech events: schooling, census practices, and television. Of particular interest are three patterns of representation which I exemplify with excerpts from three television series. The first is the language-ethnicity link long established in colonial practices and found in all three institutional representations of language use. The second pattern relates primarily to some of the new in inflections created as part of the first pattern, namely the representation of Indonesian as an index of the ethnic other. The third pattern of representation resembles a type of competing ideology where language-ethnicity links are denaturalized through practices of adequation.