Bahasa Indonesia

About 3 pages (772 words)

Bahasa Indonesia

Modern Indonesian is an Austronesian language, belonging to the same family as Hawaiian, Maori, Tagalog, Cham, and Malagasy. It is based on Malay, the main language of the Malay Peninsula and the eastern coast of Sumatra. Malay's importance derives from its role as the language of a succession of commercial states—notably Srivijaya, Jambi-Melayu, and Melaka—which dominated the lucrative trade routes of the Strait of Malacca from about 500 CE. From the thirteenth century, Malay appears to have spread widely in the coastal regions of the archipelago as a trading lingua franca.

In 1436, Melaka became the first large state in the archipelago to convert to Islam and the city became a major center of Islamic learning and the Malay language, which in turn became the principal language of Islamic conversion and discourse in the region. Arabic script was modified into a form, called pegon, suitable for writing Malay. Both Islam and the Malay language were spread further by the Muslim Malay diaspora that followed Melaka's fall to the Portuguese in 1511.

The Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) initially used Malay as a trading language, but found it useful also for administration. Whereas Javanese, the other major language of the archipelago, has elaborate levels of speech which make conversation difficult unless the hierarchical relationship of the speakers is clearly established, "trading Malay" had no such levels and became a conveniently neutral medium of communication. The spread of Malay was also assisted by Dutch ambivalence about promoting use of their own language, preferring to restrict Western education to those whom they felt needed it. Malay was also the main language of urban peranakan Chinese—that is, Chinese who retained their broad cultural identity but assimilated much local culture, including language.

In the late nineteenth century, newspapers began to appear in Malay, which gradually became the main indigenous language for engaging with the modern world. In the twentieth century, Malay was extensively used as a literary language by the Balai Pustaka, an official colonial publishing house whose task was to promote literacy. Indonesian nationalists also favored Malay because it was widely known, easy to learn, and lacked the hierarchical rules of Javanese, which they often rejected as "feudal." In 1928, a nationalist youth congress formally adopted Malay as the national language, calling it Indonesian—Bahasa Indonesia— after the independent country to which they aspired. There was no doubt it would be the official language after independence. The transition from Dutch, now rarely used in Indonesia, was hastened by the Japanese occupation (1942–1945), during which the use of Dutch and other European languages was banned. Following independence, Indonesian became the sole language of administration and public life. Regional languages, taught for only a few years in primary school, have been in retreat, though they have been sustained in Christian regions by their use in church services.

Characteristics

The vocabulary of Bahasa Indonesia has been extensively influenced by outside languages, especially Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, and English, as well as local languages such as Javanese. European influence on syntax has also been considerable. A national language commission has existed since shortly after independence with the dual task of developing Indonesian as a language able to cope with a full range of technical and philosophical topics and of protecting the language against unwanted change, including outside influence. Despite these efforts, however, vocabulary in Indonesian changes rapidly, and urban dialects, incomprehensible to standard speakers, develop and disappear rapidly.

Indonesian has no conjugations or declensions: order rather than inflexion determines the role of words in a sentence. It has, however, an elaborate system of prefixes and suffixes that alter the part of speech of a root word. For instance: the root word tinggal (to stay) gives rise to tinggalnya (place of residence), menginggalkan (to leave behind), ditinggalkan (left behind), ketinggalan (remainder), peninggalan (remains), sepeninggal (in the absence of), tinggalan (inheritance), and meninggal (to die). Other prefixes such as pasca- (post-) and tuna- (without) are recent developments reflecting Western influences.

Charles Adriaan van Ophuijzen, a colonial education official and later professor of Malay at Leiden University, developed a spelling system for Malay in 1901, but this system was modified after independence to remove several conventions based on Dutch: in 1947 oe became u and in 1973, under an Indonesian-Malaysian Language Agreement, ch changed to kh, dj to j, j to y, and tj to c. Malay also gave rise to the national language (bahasa kebangsaan) of independent Malaysia, which differs from Bahasa Indonesia only in accent and some vocabulary.