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Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

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Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#51

Post by enriquto »

temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #26
rayiner wrote: post #5

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…

There's also a lot to be said for shared institutions like government, religion, retail and media. You can drive to the other coast, and during your four or five-day journey, you will decent roads and useful signage; truck stops from same 5 chains (in truth, only 3 different companies) with reliable bathrooms, fuel, and drinks; restaurants from the same dozen chains serving familiar food; Walmarts where you can be in…

Wow, your description of the US culture is very scary. Like an exaggeratedly dystopian future. We have many problems in Europe, but this senseless uniformization is, by far, not as complete as it seems to be in the U.S.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#52

Post by matthewmacleod »

enriquto wrote: post #51
temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a lot to be said for shared institutions like government, religion, retail and media. You can drive to the other coast, and during your four or five-day journey, you will decent roads and useful signage; truck stops from same 5 chains (in truth, only 3 different companies) with reliable bathrooms, fuel, and drinks; restaurants from the same dozen chains serving familiar food; Walmarts where you can be in…

Wow, your description of the US culture is very scary. Like an exaggeratedly dystopian future. We have many problems in Europe, but this senseless uniformization is, by far, not as complete as it seems to be in the U.S.

I don’t find that scary at all - because in the gaps there’s a whole load of diversity.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#53

Post by lotsofpulp »

curtis wrote: post #14

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 man…

Bhasa means language in Hindi and it’s dialects also.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#54

Post by lmkg »

lisper wrote: post #38
temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a lot to be said for shared institutions like government, religion, retail and media. You can drive to the other coast, and during your four or five-day journey, you will decent roads and useful signage; truck stops from same 5 chains (in truth, only 3 different companies) with reliable bathrooms, fuel, and drinks; restaurants from the same dozen chains serving familiar food; Walmarts where you can be in…

> the same Lay's chips It is far from clear to me whether this is a feature or a bug.

It's a baseline. It's common that many places will have local offerings that exceed the baseline (moreso in other categories like beer than potato chips), but it's nice to know that literally the worst possible thing that could happen is they only have Lay's.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#55

Post by always_good »

enriquto wrote: post #51
temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a lot to be said for shared institutions like government, religion, retail and media. You can drive to the other coast, and during your four or five-day journey, you will decent roads and useful signage; truck stops from same 5 chains (in truth, only 3 different companies) with reliable bathrooms, fuel, and drinks; restaurants from the same dozen chains serving familiar food; Walmarts where you can be in…

Wow, your description of the US culture is very scary. Like an exaggeratedly dystopian future. We have many problems in Europe, but this senseless uniformization is, by far, not as complete as it seems to be in the U.S.

The uniform experience of the US is why I roll my eyes at people who suggest "why would I travel elsewhere if I haven't even explored my own country?"

As if seeing some new sights is the only rewarding aspect of being somewhere new rather than experiencing something truly different in life, like different culture, language, and way of life.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#56

Post by DennisP »

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…

A couple years ago I read a book about learning languages, by a guy who'd learned 30 languages to some degree and was fluent in seven. In his opinion, Indonesian was the easiest to learn by far. He gave various reasons, but what sticks in my mind is that to make any noun plural, you just say it twice.

(But I've also read that simple languages tend to develop a lot of extra nuances that native speakers use to add expressiveness, so there's a larger gap between just being able to communicate, and sounding like a native speaker.)

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#57

Post by nojvek »

wtmt wrote: post #40
pandler wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I experienced the same in India a few month ago, when I traveled the length of the west coast with an Indian friend of mine. Coming from the US, I never appreciated how diverse the country is, especially with language. In the south especially, he often struggled just as much as me to communicate with people from his own country, despite being fluent in both Hindi and English. It blew my mind a little bit, especially…

If you look at any Indian currency bill (Rupee), you'd see the denomination written in words in 22 languages, though in a smaller font. Those are the official languages of India. The official languages of the central government are Hindi and English. All government communications between the central government and state governments or between state governments commonly happen in English because India does not have on…

Can attest to this as someone who has Indian parents but not born in India. You can get further with English than you would with Hindi in some parts.

It seems India’s education has done well for introducing English to the young kids.

You still have huge language barriers. I am impressed by the diversity of the world. m

Most software is still very US centric and that makes me sad at times. English became a standard because the Victorian empire was very good at colonizing and pushing their ideas down other cultures’ throats. Good for them.

But when one learns other languages, you begin to realize how broken and inconsistent English is. If English would be a programming language, it would be PHP.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#58

Post by astrodust »

temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #26
rayiner wrote: post #5

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…

There's also a lot to be said for shared institutions like government, religion, retail and media. You can drive to the other coast, and during your four or five-day journey, you will decent roads and useful signage; truck stops from same 5 chains (in truth, only 3 different companies) with reliable bathrooms, fuel, and drinks; restaurants from the same dozen chains serving familiar food; Walmarts where you can be in…

This isn't progress, this is death by gentrification.

It's utterly sad that the same chain stores, the same shops, the same products are sold coast to coast, that the menus of most restaurants have basically zero variation from Louisiana to Arizona to California to Maine, places that historically could not be more different.

Now you can land in some random city in the US and apart from a few very small pockets that have resisted this overwhelming pressure to conform, they're all the same.

I want to visit an America where I can't understand what they're saying even though it's allegedly English, where you need to work at it, absorb the local dialect. Where they have strange terms for things that you need to learn to fit in. Where there's a sense of being somewhere and having history worth sharing.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#59

Post by astrodust »

lmkg wrote: post #54
lisper wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the same Lay's chips It is far from clear to me whether this is a feature or a bug.

It's a baseline. It's common that many places will have local offerings that exceed the baseline (moreso in other categories like beer than potato chips), but it's nice to know that literally the worst possible thing that could happen is they only have Lay's.

Americans used to ridicule people living in the Soviet Union because they had to buy the same sofa, the same car, the same beer, all manufactured by the state. They lived in the same apartments, stamped out by decree, from Europe to the Pacific.

Now having Lay's everywhere is a thing to be celebrated?

Lay's are terrible. It's like what happens to a potato when you take all the fun out of them and make them into something even blander.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#60

Post by onezeronine2 »

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…

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.

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