
Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia - MiriamWeiner
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180703-why-no-one-speaks-indonesias-language
======
curtis
The article's premise is that it seems like nobody in Indonesia speaks Bahasa
Indonesia well, because it's always a second language. I can't find a good
reference right now, but I think that's wrong. I'm under the impression that
in Jakarta and the surrounding areas (probably tens of millions of people)
Bahasa Indonesia really is spoken as a first language. I think this area has
historically been Malay-speaking anyway, and modern Indonesian is very closely
related to Malay, so this wouldn't be a big stretch.

~~~
zafiro17
In Jakarta the people speak Bahasa and Javanese equally. People who have come
in from other areas of the country speak their own language plus Bahasa; the
Javanese who were born there make Javanese the most common language.

Malay and Bahasa are 90% the same language. Bahasa is considered a traders'
language, much like Swahili - a lingua franca that allowed commerce to happen
for centuries.

Source: studied bahasa for two years and used to live on Java - amazing,
complex place.

~~~
perlancar3
I wouldn't quite say "equally". Jakarta is a melting pot and the most
significant portion of the population there is of Javanese descent. But many
many people who are of Javanese descent don't even speak Javanese, especially
if they were born in Jakarta or in the western part of Java.

~~~
curtis
It seems likely to me that people who are speaking Indonesian as a first
language (e.g. Jakartans) have a substantially larger vocabulary than those
that are speaking it as a second language (e.g. Yogyakartans). I would presume
so, but that makes me wonder what the source of that larger vocabulary --
Malay? Javanese? English? Other languages native to the Indonesian
archipelago? All of the above?

~~~
bodas
> It seems likely to me that people who are speaking Indonesian as a first
> language (e.g. Jakartans) have a substantially larger vocabulary than those
> that are speaking it as a second language (e.g. Yogyakartans).

They are speaking Indonesian as a second _native_ language, they will acquire
Javanese and Indonesian at the same time but use Javanese in conversation and
Indonesian when consuming TV, books and in school. So their grasp of formal
Indonesian is going to depend mostly on education level.

As for colloquial Indonesian, due to the internet new colloquialisms spread
much more rapidly to other parts of Indonesia. So it probably depends on how
old said Yogyakartan is.

------
curtis
Some things I learned when I was in Singapore and Indonesia about 10 years
ago:

\- Our Singaporean host had business dealings in Indonesia and he said he
could get by just relying on his Malay language skills, so it seems that Malay
and Bahasa Indonesia have a decent degree of mutual intelligibility.

\- In one of the national museums we ran into an American professor who had
been teaching part time in Indonesia for many years. Among other things, he
mentioned that when Indonesia was founded, the government created a standard
vocabulary for the language at the same time. He thought that that was one of
the smartest things they'd done.

\- One Indonesian woman that I spoke with (who I presume was Javanese)
mentioned that one of the benefits of Bahasa Indonesia was that the Javanese
in one village might not be mutually intelligible (in the practical sense,
anyway) with the Javanese spoken in another village a few miles away. But you
could always switch to Bahasa Indonesia to communicate.

\- The word "Bahasa" means "language", and in Indonesian languages always
seemed to be prefixed with ""Bahasa", e.g. "bahasa Indonesia", "bahasa
Inggris", "bahasa Jerman". However, I recall several times hearing Indonesians
using just the word "bahasa" when clearly referring to the Indonesian
language. This was speaking in English though, so it might not be
representative of how they'd say it in Indonesian.

~~~
vram22
>the Javanese in one village might not be mutually intelligible (in the
practical sense, anyway) with the Javanese spoken in another village a few
miles away.

>The word "Bahasa" means "language", and in Indonesian languages always seemed
to be prefixed with ""Bahasa", e.g. "bahasa Indonesia", "bahasa Inggris",
"bahasa Jerman".

It is probably derived from the Sanskrit word "bhaashaa" (writing it
phonetically, if that is the correct term), since Indians had traveled to and
culturally influenced parts of S.E. Asia in earlier centuries. Singapore (the
name itself is from singha-pura which means lion city), Malaysia, Thailand,
Cambodia, all have a lot of Indian cultural influence, not only in the sense
of Buddhism, but words in the language, for people and place names, food
ingredient influences and other things.

It's quite interesting, really, for me, as an Indian, because as I read
various topics about those regions, which I keep doing now and then, I keep
coming across such words and other influences that I can recognize as having
something to do with India. Of course, that sort of reading (about any
country) is interesting even without such influences existing :)

~~~
forapurpose
I don't know much about Sanskrit's history, but the linguistic similarities
don't infer its influence on SE Asian languages. The influence could have gone
the other way, from SE Asia to India (really, to South Asia; modern India's
borders are a 20th century innovation, and Sanskrit seems to originate in
Punjab, straddling modern India and Pakistan[0]) - and probably the influence
would have gone both ways. Also, a third party could have influenced both,
leaving them with similar vocabulary, and often influences are very indirect,
such as Sanskrit's influence on European languages - it wasn't due to lots of
Sanskrit speakers vacationing in France.

[0] [https://www.britannica.com/topic/Indo-Aryan-
languages](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Indo-Aryan-languages)

~~~
vram22
Check this out, as one example, in the History section:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesia)

>The influence could have gone the other way

Can be, sure. My saying that there was influence in one direction did not rule
out it happening the other way as well Good point.

>often influences are very indirect, such as Sanskrit's influence on European
languages - it wasn't due to lots of Sanskrit speakers vacationing in France.

Sure. I did not claim that. In fact, I've read a bit about the common features
of Indian and European languages, etc. - and you can detect it too, if you
listen to, or read, stuff in both Indian and European languages - e.g. mater
(Latin) ~ mata (Sanskrit), pater (Latin) ~ pita (Sanskrit), hundreds more
words that seem to sound similar or have a common root which historians say is
due to the common Proto-Indo-European roots of both, which is the topic of a
descendant (but really ancestor :) link of the one you posted:
[https://www.britannica.com/topic/Indo-European-
languages](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Indo-European-languages)

Also see: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-
European_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language)

and

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-
Europeans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Europeans)

Not sure how true all of that is, though. I have a healthy skepticism about
historians, particularly when they cross-quote each other, and make claims
about the past that almost sound like they were present there at the time :)
And another reason is how the heck can they know all that they claim to, about
things so long ago.

~~~
forapurpose
> Not sure how true all of that is, though. I have a healthy skepticism about
> historians

Is that supposed to be an argument against it? Have you examined the arguments
and evidence, which thousands of experts have examined and been convinced by?
What exactly do you object to?

~~~
vram22
> Have you examined the arguments and evidence, which thousands of experts
> have examined and been convinced by?

Which "thousands of experts", are you referring to, exactly?

Sure, there could be many thousands of "expert" historians. My point is, have
you personally "examined the arguments and evidence" of those thousands of
experts, who you claim have been convinced by said evidence? If not, why are
you arguing on their behalf?

>What exactly do you object to?

I'm objecting to the fact that _some_ of them (whose claims I have read in
history or Sanskrit courses I studied in school), state things about people
and events of centuries ago, as though they know for sure that those things
happened in the way they claim - without providing evidence, except for their
assertions, which anyone can make.

That's why I have a healthy skepticism about them.

~~~
vram22
And if you are asking me if I have examined the evidence of those historians,
what is _your_ evidence for making this statement (in an earlier comment
above, by you)? :

>it wasn't due to lots of Sanskrit speakers vacationing in France.

It may be true or false, but have you examined the evidence for it, if any? If
not, how are you saying it categorically, and questioning my doing the same on
another point (about historians)?

------
rayiner
People in America really don't appreciate the blessing of having a single
(nearly) uniformly spoken language. Being able to drop in anywhere in a
country of 300+ million people and being able to _converse_ with the locals
(not just _communicate_ , but convey your deepest thoughts)--it's a benefit
the vast majority of people in the world simply do not have.

This article touches on something I've been thinking a lot about lately--the
deepness of language. I think people have this vision of a polyglot future
with automatic computer translation. I think that's quite short sighted and
misses how deep language goes. My mom, who was born in Bangladesh, learned
English in school and moved to the U.S. as an adult. Though she has been in
the U.S. for thirty years, she will never be able to communicate in English
with the level of sophistication she does in Bengali. Indeed, even we (her
family who know better) perceive her as someone capable of a limited range of
thinking as a result of the limited range of what she can express verbally in
English.

All that resulted in quite a shock for us when she started using Facebook. On
Facebook, she can sit and mull things over and think about what she wants to
say. So we'll be taken aback by her posts quoting Dostoevsky or whatever (she
was a voracious reader of classic literature translated into Bengali). It's a
stark example how hobbling it can be to be forced to communicate in a language
that is not one's own (an idea the article delves into). It also makes me
skeptical of any idea that we can establish meaningful communications built on
automated translation.

~~~
shp0ngle
Isn't Mandarin Chinese understood on all China, from Xinjiang to Canton?

~~~
arghwhat
Think of Mandarin like English. Many regions only have it as second language,
with not everyone speaking it well (and just like with English, younger
generations do better on average). In regions where it is the first language,
it is usually a dialect differing from Standard Mandarin.

Canton (guangzhou) speaks Cantonese, Shanghai speaks Shanghainese, and so it
goes, with none of these languages having much at all to do with Mandarin (The
Shanghainese use of tones is closer to Scandinavian languages than other
Chinese languages!). In Hong Kong, Mandarin would be your _third_ language in
school, unused in public except to communicate with visiting mainlanders.

Writing is basically isolated from the spoken language, so there the primary
concern is that some areas use traditional Chinese, whereas others use
simplified.

~~~
sidibe
That's exaggerated, outside of Cantonese-speaking areas Mandarin is the native
language of the younger generations.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
That isn't true. Many people will speak their local dialect as a native
language, even outside of cantonese speaking areas. My wife is from a town in
Hunan, her mandarin is native, but that's because her mom and dad were from
different places in Hunan. But there are still many kids in that area who
speak Mandarin with a heavy accent...

Cantonese isn't very special as Chinese dialects go; e.g. Taiwanese/Fujianese
(Min Chinese) are just as proud of their dialect (more so in Taiwan where the
push for mandarin is not as strong as on the mainland).

------
voltooid
It makes sense that the language is too young to have evolved to be a means of
communication.

I remember being surprised that the phenomenon of colonial rulers of a country
imposing their own language on the population (occurred with the British
wherever they went) was not true for Indonesia. The Dutch seemed to have kept
their language out of reach for most of the local population. There being no
translation for a lot of words, especially legal terms, from Dutch to local
languages, a lot of Dutch words ended up being part of Bahasa Indonesia. This
could be more cause for it to feel like a foreign language.

------
mahesh_rm
If anybody would like to get the basics of it, here some Indonesians Natives
willing to do conversation Bahasa / English conversation exchange:

[https://lessons.coffeestrap.com/learn/Indonesian](https://lessons.coffeestrap.com/learn/Indonesian)

Disclaimer: it is a language exchange sideproject I've been working on for a
while (yes I know it needs some UX polishing work).

------
xxpor
It's always seemed wild to me that Indonesia doesn't come up more in general
in the west. It seems like the only time I hear about it in the news is when
there's a natural disaster.

~~~
khuey
Indonesia is poor, far away, not particularly significant geopolitically, and
there's no large Indonesian diaspora in the West outside of the Netherlands. A
large portion of Indonesian-Americans are actually ethnically Chinese.

~~~
Apocryphon
It's a huge country in terms of both population and land, and with abundant
natural resources including oil. It's the largest Muslim nation in the world,
and also has significant numbers of religious minorities. It's adjacent to
many other eastern and southeastern Asian markets. There's definitely interest
to be had there.

~~~
Rapzid
Largest Muslim-majority nation. However, they are on a frightening trajectory
towards becoming a Muslim nation. Their democracy is on increasingly thinning
ice.

~~~
maphar
Islamisation of Indonesian politics has happened and faded away before, in the
early 2000s. The current wave is worrisome, but there is no reason to believe
it will rise indefinitely.

~~~
Rapzid
The growth in fundamentalist groups since 1998 has not faded. The foundation
for Islamic identity politics is much sturdier in 2018.

------
AmericanChopper
This article is hyperbolic and opinionated at best, and ignorant at worst. A
vast majority of the country speaks Bahasa Indonesia as either a first or
second language. You have to go to very remote villages to find people who
don’t speak it.

The author’s idea that Indonesians have other “options” of languages to speak
if they don’t like Bahasa Indonesia is also laughable. People will generally
know their own particular ethnic language, and may choose to speak it when
they are only around others who speak it too, in the home for instance. But
people rarely elect to learn a second local language that they didn’t grow up
speaking.

Bahasa Indonesia is used very widely, partly because the opportunity to use
local languages is quite restricted, especially in cities, where the
populations are much more diverse. Regions tend to have their own localised
slang, but I think that’s true everywhere in the world.

------
mshaler
Old (not fake) news: the difference between a dialect and a language is an
army and a navy.

~~~
HumanDrivenDev
I've never liked that witticism. For one thing it breaks down really quickly -
ie by that logic Welsh is a dialect of English, and Walloon French is a
dialect of Flemish. It's also fairly irrelevant to me what a government thinks
is a dialect when I want to discuss languages. IE ethnic chinese can call
languages that are mutually unintelligable 'dialects' all they want, it
doesn't change reality.

~~~
skissane
The Yiddish original, "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot", was
targeted at people who refused to view Yiddish as an independent language, but
rather just as a dialect of German. The point was that if Yiddish-speakers had
their own country, those people wouldn't have said that.

~~~
toomanybeersies
Similarly, I've heard several non-Bavarian Germans claiming Bavarian isn't a
language, while the Bavarians claim it is.

------
dageshi
Sort of somewhat tangentially related, I've been watching a lot of Indian
youtube recipe videos recently and was a bit surprised by the amount of
English phrases being spoken. I know there's a lot of people who know English
in India but it felt like a lot of videos the presenters/chefs would switch
seamelessly from what I assume is Hindi to an English sentance and then back
again.

It felt like around 20-30% of what was said was English, the rest I assume
Hindi, but I guess what really surprised me was that it wasn't one or the
other, but a mixture of both.

~~~
wtmt
Due to the long presence of British in India and its influence, English words
have seeped into common usage across all Indian languages (except Sanskrit,
which is not practically used by a substantial number of people for general
conversation and communication). You'd find sentences in most languages
constructed with some English words that have become common over time. The
reasons for this are many, including the fact that English is considered as a
language of the higher classes in society and as the one that provides better
opportunities in life. What's also interesting, or surprising, is that the
accents and pronunciation of the English words also change with the location
and the influences of the local language.

In many states in India, and more so in the south, you'd find many people
who're able to converse in at least two to four languages, including English.

------
peterburkimsher
Javanese is not supported by Windows, MacOS, or Ubuntu, but is supported by
Google Translate.

[http://peterburk.github.io/i2018n/](http://peterburk.github.io/i2018n/)

There are more Javanese speakers in the world than Java programmers. Please
look at the other graphs that I made if you're interested in
internationalisation!

------
rurban
The only really successful state-demanded language simplification was in
Korea, with Hangul. Wonder how that happened, but Korean really is extremely
simple and successful.

New Greek is also successful, but this grew out naturally such as English out
of modernized Nieder-German. These had nothing to do with dialect unification
efforts, only natural modernizations.

The neighboring Filipino and Tagalog (it's popular natural dialect) are also
extremely simple, such as english or korean, a simple mixture of Malay and
Spanish. The Filipino effort is comparable to the standardization effort in
Indonesia, but was much more successful. Even if English is their standard
language in government now.

So in summary, a modernized language is a necessity, but only if it grew
naturally and is not too revolutionary. People tend to simplify their language
anyway, regardless of books, news or TV.

~~~
onezeronine2
Almost everyone speaks the standard Filipino anywhere in Philippines because
it is taught as a basic subject alongside English. However, Filipino is not
the majority's first language here but the grammatical structure is the same
most of time so it is easy to learn.

But today, Filipino as its own language is diminishing its own identity due to
its flexibility to combine and replace using English words. As an example, you
will rarely hear the Filipino word for sorry today, because "sorry" has been
integrated closely in conversational dialogues as a word replacement because
it is simple to say and short to write.

~~~
TulliusCicero
I hear "sorry" somewhat frequently in Munich now from Germans, I think because
there isn't a simple direct equivalent in German; "Entschuldigung" is more
like "excuse me" and "es tut mir leid" sounds kind of...stiff or overdone. At
least that's what it seems like to me.

------
rmm
Have worked in Indonesia for the past decade, various mine sites, various
islands.

Never heard of this before. I know different cities had dialects/words but
never had an issue speaking/listening bahasa with the locals.

------
chewxy
Anyone interested in conlangs would do well to study Malay. It is not a
constructed language per se, but modern standard Malay (Bahasa baku) underwent
a massively interesting standardization phase in the 60s which resulted in a
fairly consistent language today.

By contrast the standardization of Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia baku) looks
comical. The rules of Indonesian are all over the place.

Unfortunately in Malaysia, modern spoken and indeed modern written Malay has
gone the same way Indonesian has gone - textspeak and internet lingo made all
the standardization efforts in vain. But from an intellectual point of view,
standardized Malay has very nice consistent properties to it - it's a lot
harder on rules than English.

For example in English there are no rules on nounification of verbs. In Malay,
you simply wrap the lemma of the verb between "per...an" \- so speak
"kata"(meaning speak) becomes "perkataan" (meaning words). There are clearly
also rules regarding spelling - "cegah" (deter) becomes "pencegahan"
(deterrence) instead of "percegahan", but by and large the standards are sane
and doesn't have very many exceptions, or have exceptions that can actually be
encoded by rules (unlike English where it's I before E except before C, except
that's not true at all).

And the best part about the standardization is that it doesn't shun the
heritage of the language. There are a lot of Australasian aboriginal
linguistic features that made the cut and got improved in my opinion.

Take for example, the linguistic feature that is repeated across many
Australasian aboriginal languages: repeating a word to indicate a higher
count.

"Laki" as a root word means "man". "Laki laki" means... "men". The
standardization process that happened in the 50s formalized a rule that had
been in the language earlier - "Lelaki" means "men". Interestingly here's a
Indonesian grammar blog that discusses this:
[https://www.katabaku.com/2016/05/laki-laki-atau-lelaki-
yang-...](https://www.katabaku.com/2016/05/laki-laki-atau-lelaki-yang-benar-
adalah.html) (TL;DR - "lelaki" is "true" while "laki-laki" is canonical form)

In Malaysia, the word "laki-laki" is no longer being used. Instead the
language and community converged upon using the word "lelaki", which is a more
succint and elegant way of using it.

TL;DR - Malay went through a very nice standardization process while
Indonesian went through in my opinion, a not-as-well-thought-of
standardization process.

~~~
bodas
"laki" actually an example of a word that changes its meaning when
reduplicated instead of creating a plural. "laki" means _husband_ and "laki-
laki" means _man_ or _male_. So you have to be careful about using for
producing plurals. Generally Indonesians prefer to denote number contextually
e.g. by saying "one apple" or "many apple".

~~~
chewxy
"laki" means man in Malay, but is a synonym for "suami" (husband) in Indon. I
assume "lelaki" slipped into Indon lingo after a while (if you read old Malay
books, before the 1960s, the word "laki-laki" is used a lot more than
"lelaki") - I have no experience with written Indonesian stuff

------
amaccuish
I often see great articles from BBC travel, anyone know if there's an RSS
feed?

------
iafisher
Claims about the relative simplicity or complexity of different languages are
rarely grounded in actual linguistic evidence. Languages comprise so many
parts that it's not even clear what the basis of comparison could be: is
English, a language with highly restricted word order but without grammatical
case marked on most nouns, more complex than Russian, a language with
comparatively free word order but a highly articulated case system? Who can
say?

With that in mind, the statements about Bahasa Indonesian being simpler or
more rigid than other languages are more like social or cultural judgments
than bonafide linguistic facts.

~~~
decode
While I agree with you in general, a surprising number of grammatical features
that make many other languages difficult to learn are missing in Indonesian.
Some examples:

No grammatical gender

No plural forms of nouns

No grammatical case

No verb conjugations

No verb tenses

In addition, written Indonesian uses the Latin alphabet and has a very
consistent phonemic orthography.

Of course, it also has some more complicated features, like formal and
informal pronouns. But it still seems fair to me to say that it is
grammatically simpler than many (most?) other spoken languages.

~~~
tikwidd
I don't think that is fair to say. There are lots of other languages that lack
most/all of these features (e.g. Mandarin has no gender, limited number
marking, no case marking, lack of inflections). Indonesian is not unique in
that regard.

Indonesian verbs lack the tense, number and person agreement marking that is
commonly found in European languages, but they have a lot of derivational
morphology including complex voice and valency operations (Austronesian
alignment[0], causatives, applicatives etc.)

Indonesian also has noun classifiers like Mandarin which have to be memorised
like grammatical genders.

[0]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_alignment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_alignment)

