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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

#121

Post by rayiner »

selimthegrim wrote: post #117
rayiner wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It may be more interesting to visit such an America, but it would be a lot harder to democratically govern such an America.

Hell, we can barely democratically govern Louisiana. Not for nothing did A.J. Liebling dub it Lebanon.

> Hell, we can barely democratically govern Louisiana.

No disagreement from me on that. Inclusion of Louisiana, Alabama, etc., in the republic is a real challenge.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#122

Post by tikwidd »

decode wrote: post #76
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 complicat…

I don't think that is fair to say. There are lots of other languages that lack most/all of these features (e.g. Mandarin has no gender, limited number marking, no case marking, lack of inflections). Indonesian is not unique in that regard.

Indonesian verbs lack the tense, number and person agreement marking that is commonly found in European languages, but they have a lot of derivational morphology including complex voice and valency operations (Austronesian alignment[0], causatives, applicatives etc.)

Indonesian also has noun classifiers like Mandarin which have to be memorised like grammatical genders.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_alignment

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#124

Post by skissane »

HumanDrivenDev wrote: post #113
mshaler wrote: post #37

Old (not fake) news: the difference between a dialect and a language is an army and a navy.

I've never liked that witticism. For one thing it breaks down really quickly - ie by that logic Welsh is a dialect of English, and Walloon French is a dialect of Flemish. It's also fairly irrelevant to me what a government thinks is a dialect when I want to discuss languages. IE ethnic chinese can call languages that are mutually unintelligable 'dialects' all they want, it doesn't change reality.

The Yiddish original, "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot", was targeted at people who refused to view Yiddish as an independent language, but rather just as a dialect of German. The point was that if Yiddish-speakers had their own country, those people wouldn't have said that.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#125

Post by netsharc »

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…

> 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.

No, they speak daily Indonesian. If an Indonesian spoke formal Indonesian it would be comparable to an English-speaker speaking lawyerese (imagine someone sounding like a EULA).

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#126

Post by toomanybeersies »

HumanDrivenDev wrote: post #113
mshaler wrote: post #37

Old (not fake) news: the difference between a dialect and a language is an army and a navy.

I've never liked that witticism. For one thing it breaks down really quickly - ie by that logic Welsh is a dialect of English, and Walloon French is a dialect of Flemish. It's also fairly irrelevant to me what a government thinks is a dialect when I want to discuss languages. IE ethnic chinese can call languages that are mutually unintelligable 'dialects' all they want, it doesn't change reality.

People use it like it's a rule, but it was more a specific quip about Yiddish, and how many saw it as a dialect of German, rather than a distinct language.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#127

Post by toomanybeersies »

skissane wrote: post #124
HumanDrivenDev wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never liked that witticism. For one thing it breaks down really quickly - ie by that logic Welsh is a dialect of English, and Walloon French is a dialect of Flemish. It's also fairly irrelevant to me what a government thinks is a dialect when I want to discuss languages. IE ethnic chinese can call languages that are mutually unintelligable 'dialects' all they want, it doesn't change reality.

The Yiddish original, "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot", was targeted at people who refused to view Yiddish as an independent language, but rather just as a dialect of German. The point was that if Yiddish-speakers had their own country, those people wouldn't have said that.

Similarly, I've heard several non-Bavarian Germans claiming Bavarian isn't a language, while the Bavarians claim it is.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#128

Post by vpribish »

singingfish wrote: post #97
rayiner wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It may be more interesting to visit such an America, but it would be a lot harder to democratically govern such an America.

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.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#129

Post by maphar »

Rapzid wrote: post #107
Apocryphon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#130

Post by jhbadger »

vintagedave wrote: post #110
astrodust wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Try visiting an English-speaking country that's not America. I suggest that because the inverse was true for me: In 2010, I (Australian) ended up in a hotel somewhere between Mobi…

I remember ordering a burger in the South once and being asked "Do you want that all the way?" I, being from the Northern Midwest, had no idea what the waitress was asking. It turns out she was asking whether I wanted all the toppings (which in my dialect I would call "with the works") or with no or only a few toppings.
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