Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 163 posts

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#71

Post by derekp7 »

astrodust wrote: post #58
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…

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 h…

There is still a lot of that out there (getting smaller though). For example if you aren't in the American South, don't expect to be able to order sweet tea in a restaurant -- instead, you will get iced tea and some packets of sugar (which isn't the same as putting sugar in when the tea is being made). Only recently have I seen sweet tea offered in some places.

I grew up in the midwest, however my mom is from the deep south. So I didn't realize that most people around here have never had (or heard of) a banana sandwich (made with banana, mayo, and white bread). And until recently, you couldn't get things like headache powder (Goody's, Stanback, BC). That was strictly a Southern thing.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#72

Post by derekp7 »

vram22 wrote: post #61
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…

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.

More like a tossed salad!

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#73

Post by denzil_correa »

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…

> 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.

It is called "Code-switching" which is a common theme amongst multi-linguals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#74

Post by amaccuish »

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 think it's more about it being a second language. People usually don't have too many difficulties with their mother tongue. The problem comes, as this article implies, when people try to learn a second, especially when they're not experienced in language learning. This is the case here because they're trying to get many different groups to move to a standardised language. A simpler grammar makes a lot of difference in cases like these.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#75

Post by arghwhat »

nexus2045 wrote: post #50
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…

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 cu…

My wife is from Shanghai, but spent the later half of her life in Hong Kong, so she speaks Shanghainese, Cantonese, Mandarin, English fluently and now also Danish and Swedish intermediate. As I am Scandinavian, I am mostly just conveying her knowledge and my brief observations, all while she makes me feel horribly inadequate in the language department.

I recall a trip to Shanghai a while back where my wife mentioned that her Shanghainese was rusty, which she felt resulted in her being considered foreign. It would appear to me that people were still preferring Shanghainese, although she did mention that Mandarin words were used at random.

Are you talking about a younger generation yet, or might I have been misunderstanding something (very probable)? I'd ask her myself, but she's in Mainland doing research right now, and The Great Firewall makes communication patchy at best. :/

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#76

Post by decode »

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…

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.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#77

Post by denzil_correa »

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…

I knew 4 languages before I went to school. My parents know 2 additional languages (they grew up in a different state) than me. I can't read, speak or write these languages. So, if I travel to the place where they grew up - I'm a tourist.

The more you try to put India in a box to simplify things, the more complex it gets. Joan Robison, a Cambridge Economist once said "whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true."

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#78

Post by dejv »

jamiek88 wrote: post #32
notahacker wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not even convinced the basic argument that a language with 40-odd million people regarding it as their primary language is not widely spoken is true (never mind the ludicrously false clickbaity "no-one speaks" headline). Sure, more Indonesians speak other languages at home and with fellow native speakers because they're the local languages of particular areas, some of which were more widely spoken than the Malay…

Visit Newcastle, Liverpool or Glasgow and I think a lot of people basing their English comprehension on the ‘BBC’ accent will not have an easy time, I agree.

True, I am fairly fluent in English, but when I moved to Liverpool I was lost and even ordering some basic stuff was often challenge. Even now when I get back I need some time to get used to their accent.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#79

Post by reaperducer »

astrodust wrote: post #58
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…

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 h…

This isn't progress, this is death by gentrification

I don't know if gentrification is the right word. Maybe death by standardization.

The big breakthrough that made McDonald's a successful company was coming up with processes and supply chains that allowed its food to be predictable.

Before McDonald's, when you drove across the country and stopped at a burger joint, you never knew what the food would be like. Today, if you see the golden arches, you know exactly that the food will look like, taste like, and for the most part, cost.

This is also true on an international level. Even though there are regional items on McDonald's menus, when I buy fries in St. Petersburg, Florida, they taste exactly the same as the ones I get in St. Petersburg, Russia.

There's a name for it in diplomatic circles, but the term escapes me. Essentially, opening McDonald's restaurants in a new country introduces that country to supply chains, language, tastes, and other Western elements that help bridge the cultural gap between nations and brings a level of understanding to the masses that eventually leads to closer relations. It's the reason that when McDonald's first went into Europe, it used the slogan "The taste of America."

With the exception of Russia and Georgia, it's said that no two nations that have McDonald's have ever gone to war.

A lot of people with no understanding of history laughed when it was brought up that opening a McDonald's in North Korea was an important part of the Trump-Kim summit. But diplomats saw it as a watershed moment.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#80

Post by TulliusCicero »

vram22 wrote: post #61
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…

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.

I think many tend to exaggerate the level of regional differences in America. Sure, there are some significant differences, but it's nowhere close to the level of difference of going to another country (except Canada).

For example, language wise, if someone was raised in the US, I probably can't tell at all where they're from, especially if they're younger and/or college educated. Regional accents are weak as hell in the states, on average.

I've lived in several regions in the US and never really got a feeling of being out of place or alien that I get sometimes visiting other countries.

Post reply on HN