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Hello everyone.
Welcome to the Langfocus channel and my name is Paul.
Today's topic is the Indonesian language,
or Bahasa Indonesia as it's called in Indonesian.
Indonesian is closely connected with Malay.
So, if you haven't seen my video on the Malay language yet,
I recommend that you watch that first before you watch this video.
Indonesian is based on Malay,
though it has evolved and taken on some uniquely Indonesian features.
There are about 43 million native speakers of Indonesian
and about 155 million second language speakers of Indonesian,
mainly in Indonesia where it's the national language and the sole official language.
Why does Indonesian have so many more second language speakers than native speakers?
Well, there are hundreds of languages spoken in Indonesia
and Indonesian functions as a lingua franca
between speakers of different languages.
It's the language of education and of media and these days everybody learns Indonesian.
But, most Indonesians still speak a different regional language as their native language
plus, Indonesian, the national language.
How was the Indonesian language born?
Indonesian is based on the Malay language
which has been a lingua franca of trade and of the elite
throughout the Malay Archipelago for centuries.
The story of Indonesian begins during the colonial period.
In the early 17th century,
the VOC or the Dutch East India company established a trading post at Batavia,
the site of present-day Jakarta,
and over the following three centuries expanded
into other areas of present-day Indonesia.
The Dutch East India company made Malay
the administrative language of its trading outpost.
In 1799, the Dutch East India company went bankrupt
and the Dutch government took control of the colony.
In the late 18th century,
the British East India Company had also arrived in the archipelago.
And in 1824, a treaty between the British and the Dutch
divided the area between the British to the north and the Dutch to the south.
In the Dutch colony,
the promotion of the Dutch language and education in Dutch began,
but only to a limited extent, mostly for the elite.
Compared to other colonial powers,
the Dutch were not really interested in changing the culture of the colonized people.
Their main goal was to facilitate trade.
Therefore since Malay was already a lingua franca that could facilitate trade,
there was no reason for them to introduce Dutch as a lingua franca.
The Dutch promoted Malay as the language of education,
recognizing "Riau Malay",
the classical Malay spoken in the Malacca and Johor Sultanates,
as the standard language.
The standard form of Malay continued to develop
with the abundance of Malay literature in the 19th century.
And in the 20th century, Malay linguists published dictionaries and grammars
to further standardize and modernize the language.
The Dutch language never became widespread in Indonesia.
In fact, in 1940, only 2% of Indonesians spoke Dutch .
But, even though the role of the Dutch language was very limited,
a large number of Dutch loanwords entered the Malay language
in the areas under Dutch control.
And this is one of the things that made the Indonesian variety of Malay
different from other varieties.
In the early 20th century, a pro-independence movement arose
and people throughout the Dutch colony
began to see themselves as a single people, Indonesians.
The term Indonesia was a new term for the archipelago,
created by European ethnologists
but adopted by nationalists in the Dutch colony.
At the Youth Conference of 1928,
young nationalists declared the Youth Pledge with three ideals:
one motherland, one nation, and one language.
The language they chose was the Indonesian variety of Malay,
which they named "Bahasa Indonesia".
When Indonesia declared independence in 1945,
Indonesian was declared the national language of the new country.
But why Indonesian?
At the time of independence,
Indonesian was the native language of only 5% of the population,
while Javanese was the native language of over 40% of the population.
So, why wasn't Javanese chosen to be the national language?
Well, that would have shown favoritism to Indonesia's largest ethnic group,
undermining the national unity of the country.
But Indonesian, previously known just as Malay,
had been a lingua franca throughout the archipelago for centuries,
so people in various regions of the country already knew some Malay.
It was also a much simpler language than Javanese
and could realistically be learned by millions of people as a second language.
Indonesian turned out to be the right choice,
successfully becoming the language of government, education,
trade and communication between people in different regions of the country.
Indonesian completely replaced the former colonial language Dutch
as the language of public life,
that's something that's very rare in former colonies.
Today, Indonesian is still the second language of most Indonesian people,
but it's becoming increasingly more common as a native language,
especially in the cities.
That's because people from all over the country moved to the big cities,
so rather than speak their native regional languages,
they speak Indonesian instead.
Some of them get married with each other,
and they raise their children speaking Indonesian as their primary language.
So, what is Indonesian like?
Well, undoubtedly, one of the things that made Indonesian
so successful as a national language so quickly was its simplicity.
If you've seen my video on Malay,
then you're already familiar with the simplicity of Indonesian,
because in its standard form, it's very close to standard Malay,
just with some different vocabulary.
Here are some features of Indonesian.
Indonesian has simple phonology and orthography.
In general, one letter represents just one sound.
Indonesian has simple SVO sentence structure.
There are no case inflections in Indonesian.
There's also no grammatical gender in Indonesian.
There's no plural form in Indonesian, and explicit plurals are made by republication.
Reduplication meaning that you repeat the word again.
And perhaps best of all: no verb conjugations.
Let's look at a few Indonesian sentences and we'll identify some of those features.
This sentence means : "They are cooking eggs for breakfast"
Word-for-word it's: They - now - cook - egg - for - breakfast.
We can see that the sentence is SVO.
As I said before, there are no verb conjugations.
So, how do we know that this action is happening now?
Well, it's because of this word right here: "sedang"
This is an adverb that indicates that something is happening right now.
You can change the tense of the verb by changing this adverb.
Here's another sentence:
After changing the word "sedang" to "sudah",
the sentence now means: "They cooked eggs for breakfast",
in the past tense.
The adverb "sudah" means something like "already",
and shows that an action has been completed.
How about the future tense?
Here "akan" is the future adverb.
Another example:
This means: "Like me, he often travels to Lombok".
Word-for-word, it's: Like - I - he - often - (to) travel - to - Lombok
Another example:
This means : "Do you want to sit?"
"Apa" is a yes-or-no question marker.
So word-for-word, it's : question - you - want - sit
But "apa" is often left out in speech.
And notice that to express desire,
you can just add "mau" right before another verb.
The second verb doesn't change its form at all.
Another example:
This means: "I write letters for my friend"
Word-for-word, it's : I - write - letter - for - friend - I
Notice that the word for "letters" : "surat", is the same as the singular form.
Also notice that possession is shown by placing a personal pronoun right after a noun.
"Teman saya" literally "friend - I" means "my friend".
This makes it quite easy to form possessives.
Another example:
This means "I don't like eating peanuts"
Word-for-word, it's: I - no - like - eat - peanut.
So, we negate a sentence by adding "tidak" before the verb.
And notice that similar to the word "mau", which means "want",
we can express "like" by placing the word "suka" right before another verb.
This means: "The peanuts have already been eaten"
Word by word, it's "peanuts - already - be eaten',
the verb "dimakan" is a passive.
Let's take a look at some of the verbs from the above sentences.
You can see that these Indonesian verbs have two parts:
a root in black and an affix in red.
Indonesian has many such affixes that are added to roots to make verbs and nouns.
One example, the root : "tulis", meaning "to write".
We have
= "to write" (infinitive)
"to be written"
"something that's written"
"to write something down"
"a writer"
"the process of writing"
"to have (...) written on it"
"with the writing or words".
You can see more examples of such affixes in my video on Malay,
which functions in the same way.
Affixes are the most challenging part of learning Indonesian,
at least for a lot of learners.
But, you can make use of that feature of the roots and affixes
to help you learn new words through their connections with other words.
Standard Indonesian really is a simple language, compared to other languages.
But, that's Standard Indonesian,
which is normally used as the written language and in formal contexts.
The way Indonesian is spoken in daily life
is often fairly different from Standard Indonesian.
Different varieties of colloquial Indonesian are spoken around the country,
and they're influenced by the local native language in that area.
These different varieties of Indonesian are referred to as "Bahasa Gaul".
The Bahasa Gaul of Jakarta is influenced by Betawi,
the Malay creole language that's native to Jakarta,
as well as by Javanese and Sundanese,
since people from all over Indonesia move to Jakarta.
Let's look at the Bahasa Gaul of Jakarta,
and see how it differs from Standard Indonesian.
Here's a sentence we looked at before.
Now in Bahasa Gaul:
The first difference we see is that the word "sedang"
which indicates present tense is "lagi" in Bahasa Gaul.
"Lagi" is also used in Standard Indonesian to mean "again" or "still",
but it's not used as a present tense marker like this.
Another difference is that the verb "memasak"
is used in its root form "masak" without the prefix.
Then, we have a sound difference in the word "telur", which becomes like "telor".
And then, "untuk" becomes "buat", which can be used in Standard Indonesian,
but the meaning is more like "in order to".
In Bahasa Gaul, you can use it to simply mean "for".
Now, in Bahasa Gaul :
Here notice that the word "sudah" is reduced to "udah".
Now, in Bahasa Gaul :
Here notice that the future marker "akan" becomes "bakal"
Another example:
Now, in Bahasa Gaul :
The first difference here is that the word "seperti",
meaning "like", changes to "kayak".
Then, notice that "saya" becomes "gue", which is a loanword from Betawi.
And "berlibur" becomes "liburan", the root is the same,
but the affixes are different.
In this example, we'll see two variations of Bahasa Gaul.
The first variation is a simple casual sentence.
Notice that the yes-or-no question marker "apa" isn't there.
Instead, at the end, you see "gak", which means "no" in Bahasa Gaul.
So it's like "You want to sit, no?"
The second variation is used for close friends
or people the same age as you or younger.
The second person pronoun is "lu",
which I believe is a loanword from Chinese,
which is present in the Betawi creole language of Jakarta.
In this example, let's look at some options for first-person pronouns.
In a casual-polite sentence, you use "saya" even in Bahasa Gaul.
In a more casual familiar sentence, "aku" is used.
And when "aku" is used as a possessive,
a shortened form is attached to the end of the noun.
In a more intimate sentence, "gua" or "gue" is used.
Also notice that "menulis" loses its prefix,
but it doesn't revert to its root form "tulis",
instead it maintains the nasal sound at the beginning.
And, one more small difference we can see
is that the word for friend "teman" is pronounced more like "temen".
And another example:
Now in Bahasa Gaul :
Again here we see the pronoun "gua",
and we see that the negative "tidak" becomes "nggak",
which is related to the word "gak" which we saw before.
And in Bahasa Gaul, "suka" sometimes becomes "demen".
And one last example:
Now in Bahasa Gaul :
Here the only difference is that "sudah" becomes "udah", as we saw before.
So, you can see that the colloquial Indonesian of Jakarta
is fairly different from Standard indonesian.
And there are varieties like this spoken around the country.
The influence of the other languages of Indonesia on colloquial Indonesian
is one of the things that sets the language apart from other varieties of Malay.
Indonesian is definitely a fun language to study,
and communicating with Indonesians in their national language and lingua franca
is an amazing experience.
The question of the day for Indonesians:
To what extent do you speak Standard Indonesian?
And to what extent do you speak Bahasa Gaul?
And in what situations? Leave your comments down below.
And for learners of Indonesian:
What's been your experience communicating with Indonesian people?
Do you find the standard Indonesian that you learn at textbooks to be useful?
Or do you feel like you should be learning more of the language as it's really spoken?
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Thank you very much and have a nice day.