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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

#61

Post by vram22 »

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…

An interesting thing is that despite all that, there is still a huge amount of diversity in the US, along many dimensions, based on what I've read in Wikipedia, for example, about regional US cuisines. The US might be a melting pot, but many of the ingredients in the pot are not quite melted - to coin a phrase :) - and I hope they stay that way.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#62

Post by vram22 »

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…

>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 :)

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#63

Post by hikarudo »

astrodust wrote: post #59
lmkg wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 somet…

I think they meant that you can find Lay's everywhere, not that you can only find Lay's everywhere. There's a huge difference between those two things. I'd take that any day over Soviet Union.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#64

Post by bodas »

curtis wrote: post #45
perlancar3 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#65

Post by satbyy »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #53
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.

Yes, the root is from Sanskrit (भाषा), got called over to SE Asia during the spread of Buddhism from India.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#66

Post by forapurpose »

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…

> religion

There's not a lot of shared religion in the US, other than growing secularism. Agnosticism, last I saw, was the fastest growing belief. When Americans were more religious, there was a lot of conflict over that.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#67

Post by vram22 »

pandler wrote: post #27
imjustsaying wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad you asked, as this article reminded me of that. Outside of Northern China, where Mandarin is original dialect, the answer is no, Mandarin is not understood throughout the country on a level that English is in the US. It's a kind of second language for many, with younger generations generally being more fluent than their elders. Like the Indonesian dialect, it's somewhat forced by recent government mandate except…

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…

> 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.

The languages [1] of the 4 southern states of India are somewhat different from Hindi and other northern, central, western and eastern Indian languages (not too sure about the north-eastern states like Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, etc., though I guess even they have some Sanskrit influence, e.g. even two of those state names are Sanskrit-based - Manipur means jewel city and Meghalaya means abode of clouds - roughly).

I say "somewhat different" because, some of the the southern languages do have some Sanskrit influence and Sanskrit or Sanskrit-derived words, like the other ones do. I think the others are supposed to have much more Sanskrit influence. For example if you understand Sanskrit you can understand a lot of Hindi, and vice versa. (Studied both in school for some years.)

[1] Tamil in Tamil Nadu, Malayalam in Kerala, Telugu [2] in Andhra Pradesh (and now Telengana, which split off from Andhra some years ago), and Kannada in Karnataka are the 4 main southern languages, although there are dialects of them, and probably some other less well-known languages too (Tulu is one - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulu_language ). The amount of variety and diversity on many fronts in India is amazing.

For example, I did not know for a long time that Modi script was an alternative script earlier used to write the Marathi language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modi_script

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_language - see the part about it being called "the Italian of the East" :) - I used to think that it was because it is lilting or sort of rolls off your tongue, like Italian (guessing), but saw in the article that it is because words end with vowels in both languages.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#68

Post by arghwhat »

sidibe wrote: post #25
arghwhat wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

I disagree, but I'd like to add that just like everywhere else in the world, the younger generations have a higher average level of education and linguistic skill, thus being better at both second and third languages than the previous generations.

Mandarin words are also adopted in local languages to fill gaps by the younger generations, just like English words are often put to use in the west. Not as fully incorporated loan-words, but just as a Mandarin word randomly injected into a foreign language sentence (Those speaking Cantonese use English words instead).

However, the native tongue of the younger generations is not Mandarin, at least not in any of the areas I have knowledge of.

Source: Married to a native Shanghainese (who is in the 20-30 range) who spend half her life in Hong Kong, and thus spoke Cantonese, Shanghainese, Mandarin and English fluently out of necessity (more western languages have been added to the list later on).

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#69

Post by MarkMc »

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 know what counts as bonafide linguistic facts but when I studied Indonesian I was struck by how much more regular and simpler it was than English. For example:

umum = public, pengumuman = announcement

adil = fair, pengadilan = court/trial

jahat = evil, penjahat = criminal

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#70

Post by hikarudo »

DennisP wrote: post #56
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 expr…

I think that book is titled "How to learn any language", by Barry Farber.
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