In Sundanese, a western Austronesian language, speech levels allow the speaker to establish social identity through talk alone, using multiple linguistic forms with very different pragmatic meanings. These words are deference and demeanor indexicals, as in the French formal versus informal second person. It is argued that although they do exist, these speech levels establish social identities that are inherently ambiguous. In Sundanese, who or what one is talking about, not who or what someone is talking to, determines usage. A lack of fluency of usage by native speakers is found to be due to large scale cultural processes and details of the registers themselves, even though the honorific registers are found in everyday conversation. The ideology of the registers, rather than their actual usage, appears to be the most important point to consider for acceptable usage. (NAV)