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Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

bbc.com

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Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#41

Post by iafisher »

simias wrote: post #9
iafisher wrote: post #3

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 arti…

I don't quite understand your comment in relation with the article. The main subject isn't the complexity or simplicity of the language but rather that it's not effectively used by the population at large which makes it a relatively inefficient tool for communication. He mentions that the language "has fewer words than most languages" but that's not his main point. This text is also clearly not meant as a treatise of…

> For instance I'd PERSONALLY consider Portuguese to be OBJECTIVELY harder than Spanish.

Emphasis mine.

I don't mean to say that some languages aren't more difficult for speakers of a particular language to learn--no doubt French is easier for English speakers to learn than Chinese. A speaker of a different language that is also tonal would likely find Chinese easier to learn, though. What you're really measuring is not complexity but similarity.

You have a good point that some languages may have more difficult writing systems than others. Linguists traditionally don't consider orthography to be part of a language proper, as a language can have multiple writing systems (like Serbo-Croatian) or none at all, but you're right that most people don't make that fine a distinction between language and writing system.

I didn't mean to be overly critical of the article, which I mostly enjoyed, but saying that a language is "simple" or "rigid" carries a lot of cultural and political baggage--think about how Europeans of the colonial period denigrated African languages, or how in the United States, Australia and Canada indigenous children were punished for using their own language.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#42

Post by [deleted] »

foldr wrote: post #13
simias wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite understand your comment in relation with the article. The main subject isn't the complexity or simplicity of the language but rather that it's not effectively used by the population at large which makes it a relatively inefficient tool for communication. He mentions that the language "has fewer words than most languages" but that's not his main point. This text is also clearly not meant as a treatise of…

No-one disputes that some writing systems are more complex than others, but statements like an "objectively more complex phonology" or "slightly trickier grammar" are pretty difficult to cash out in precise terms. We know that kids learn all of these languages at the same pace, which suggests that the complexity differences between spoken languages are not particularly significant from the point of view of someone wh…

[deleted]

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#43

Post by 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.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#44

Post by rurban »

dageshi wrote: post #39

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 w…

India has so many different languages that's it's simply a necessity to repeat the most important parts said in English. Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil are only the most important ones, but their are hundreds of them. To unify such a huge market you mix in english phrases to get the general meaning across.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#45

Post by curtis »

perlancar3 wrote: post #29
zafiro17 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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?

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#46

Post by wtmt »

dageshi wrote: post #39

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 w…

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.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#47

Post by Apocryphon »

khuey wrote: post #31
xxpor wrote: post #23

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.

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.

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.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#48

Post by Apocryphon »

rurban wrote: post #43

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 na…

And how about Modern Hebrew?

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#49

Post by wtmt »

xxpor wrote: post #23

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.

Indonesia does seem to have more than its fair share of natural calamities, but anyone who looks at a map cannot help but wonder at how much the country is spread across latitudes and longitudes, while not being extremely large in terms of land area (compared to say, the five largest countries in the world by land area). Such a country having one language as the lingua franca is a big deal, despite the difficulties and inconsistencies pointed out in this article.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#50

Post by nexus2045 »

arghwhat wrote: post #18
shp0ngle wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

To add to this (as a Hong Kong native): Hong Kong is definitely a weird, special case, having belonged to Britain until 1997 and basically most people growing up there on some level despise the mainland, communism, and the language. To this day there's a certain level of disdain and judgment against you if you speak Mandarin there, almost like you're branded as "the others".

It's also true that provinces with rich cultures far away from Beijing continue to have their local dialects thrive. This is very true of Guangdong and Sichuan/Chongqing (see Sichuan rap). Yunnan also is quite noted for having many minorities and dialects still being preserved. The same cannot be said for Shanghai, where the younger generation have been eager to adopt to just speaking Mandarin as the mainstream thing to do. I had a girlfriend from Wuhan, and she grew up listening to the dialect there but her parents never encouraged her to converse in it, so she only speaks Mandarin.

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