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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

#141

Post by bodas »

chewxy wrote: post #101

Anyone interested in conlangs would do well to study Malay. It is not a constructed language per se, but modern standard Malay (Bahasa baku) underwent a massively interesting standardization phase in the 60s which resulted in a fairly consistent language today. By contrast the standardization of Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia baku) looks comical. The rules of Indonesian are all over the place. Unfortunately in Malaysia…

"laki" actually an example of a word that changes its meaning when reduplicated instead of creating a plural. "laki" means husband and "laki-laki" means man or male. So you have to be careful about using for producing plurals. Generally Indonesians prefer to denote number contextually e.g. by saying "one apple" or "many apple".

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#142

Post by chewxy »

bodas wrote: post #141
chewxy wrote: post #101

Anyone interested in conlangs would do well to study Malay. It is not a constructed language per se, but modern standard Malay (Bahasa baku) underwent a massively interesting standardization phase in the 60s which resulted in a fairly consistent language today. By contrast the standardization of Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia baku) looks comical. The rules of Indonesian are all over the place. Unfortunately in Malaysia…

"laki" actually an example of a word that changes its meaning when reduplicated instead of creating a plural. "laki" means husband and "laki-laki" means man or male . So you have to be careful about using for producing plurals. Generally Indonesians prefer to denote number contextually e.g. by saying "one apple" or "many apple".

"laki" means man in Malay, but is a synonym for "suami" (husband) in Indon. I assume "lelaki" slipped into Indon lingo after a while (if you read old Malay books, before the 1960s, the word "laki-laki" is used a lot more than "lelaki") - I have no experience with written Indonesian stuff

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#143

Post by maphar »

curtis wrote: post #20

The article's premise is that it seems like nobody in Indonesia speaks Bahasa Indonesia well, because it's always a second language. I can't find a good reference right now, but I think that's wrong. I'm under the impression that in Jakarta and the surrounding areas (probably tens of millions of people) Bahasa Indonesia really is spoken as a first language. I think this area has historically been Malay-speaking anywa…

Indeed about 20% of Indonesians speak mostly Indonesian at home.

source: 2010 census http://sp2010.bps.go.id/files/ebook/kewarganegaraan%20pendud...

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#144

Post by Rapzid »

bodas wrote: post #140
Rapzid wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Largest Muslim-majority nation. However, they are on a frightening trajectory towards becoming a Muslim nation. Their democracy is on increasingly thinning ice.

It is democracy and free speech that is enabling Islamic politics in Indonesia. The alternative is a strongman who imposes secularism. Indonesia already tried that, it is not so good for minorities.

Indonesia doesn't have free speech. Look what happened to Ahok. The FPI, who wants to institute sharia law, managed to get him jailed for two years on a BS blasphemy charge. Where is the "atheism" option for the KTP?

I'm afraid the concept of separation of Church and state in the Indonesian constitution and principles is not nearly strong enough. It's trying to have the cake and eat it too. I don't believe the legal constructs and government checks are strong enough to resist what's coming.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#145

Post by Rapzid »

maphar wrote: post #129
Rapzid wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Largest Muslim-majority nation. However, they are on a frightening trajectory towards becoming a Muslim nation. Their democracy is on increasingly thinning ice.

Islamisation of Indonesian politics has happened and faded away before, in the early 2000s. The current wave is worrisome, but there is no reason to believe it will rise indefinitely.

The growth in fundamentalist groups since 1998 has not faded. The foundation for Islamic identity politics is much sturdier in 2018.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#146

Post by Accacin »

arghwhat wrote: post #75
nexus2045 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Similar to my wife, she's from Shantou and speaks her local dialect Teochew (pretty much used by everyone in her hometown), Mandarin and also Cantonese fluently.

According to her though, everyone in her city speaks the local dialect, and they only speak Mandarin if needed.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#147

Post by peterburkimsher »

Javanese is not supported by Windows, MacOS, or Ubuntu, but is supported by Google Translate.

http://peterburk.github.io/i2018n/

There are more Javanese speakers in the world than Java programmers. Please look at the other graphs that I made if you're interested in internationalisation!

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#148

Post by rurban »

Apocryphon wrote: post #48
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?

Ah yes, same as Greek.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#149

Post by singingfish »

vpribish wrote: post #128
singingfish wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I kind of get the feeling indonesian democracy is in a healthier state than american democracy.

then your feelings are mis-calibrated. They only have had free elections for 20 years! Aceh is practically a theocracy. Political violence is common. They just jailed under blasphemy laws the loser of of the governor's election in Jakarta. but don't take my word for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index US - at an embarrassing, miserable 21st place scoring 7.98. Indonesia - 68th.

I bet it would be a different story if you took the direction of movement of the score.

Honestly I was thinking about the presidential politics rather than regional. Indonesia is a large and diverse country. Similar population to the USA and arguably more diverse.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#150

Post by draw_down »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #147

Javanese is not supported by Windows, MacOS, or Ubuntu, but is supported by Google Translate. http://peterburk.github.io/i2018n/ There are more Javanese speakers in the world than Java programmers. Please look at the other graphs that I made if you're interested in internationalisation!

If we had a tool that translated English into Java, we’d really be cooking.
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