Bahasa Indonesia is the official language of Indonesia, spoken by over 200 million people. It’s a standardized language and mainly serves as a second language. It’s based on Malay and has borrowed words from Dutch and Arabic. The structure is simple, with no tenses or verb conjugation.
Bahasa Indonesia is the official language of Indonesia and is spoken by more than 200 million people. It is a standardized language and mostly serves as a second language for people in Indonesia to help them communicate with each other. Less than 30 million people speak Bahasa Indonesia as their native language. Bahasa Indonesia is sometimes referred to by people outside Indonesia as simply Indonesian, or even as Bahasa. The name itself means ‘language of Indonesia’, and therefore calling it Bahasa is seen by many as an incorrect abbreviation, as it simply means ‘language’.
Bahasa Indonesia has taken a popular dialect of the Malay language spoken throughout the Malay Peninsula and standardized it for use as the national language of Indonesia following the declaration of independence in 1945. Speakers of Bahasa Indonesia can communicate and understand speakers of Malay and seen vice versa, the distinction between Malay and Bahasa Indonesian as distinct languages is more a matter of political significance than anything else.
Bahasa Indonesia has adopted a great many words from other languages, especially from Dutch. Since much of Indonesia was a territory of the Netherlands, the Dutch lent a huge amount of words to Bahasa Indonesia, spanning all areas of the vocabulary. These words have tended to change somewhat after their adoption, approaching the standard Bahasa Indonesian sound in pronunciation, especially when there are clusters of many consonants – a situation not common in Bahasa Indonesia itself. Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country, so Arabic also plays an important role in the religious life of its people, and a number of Arabic words have also been adopted in Bahasa Indonesia.
The structure of Bahasa Indonesia is quite simple compared to other languages, and English speakers usually find it relatively easy to acquire. Pluralization of words in Bahasa Indonesia is done by simply repeating the word, so that monyet means “monkey” and monyet-monyet means “monkeys”. There are no tenses in Bahasa Indonesia – time is connected using distinct time words – and verbs do not conjugate even to refer to person or quantity. Most words don’t even have a gender distinction, so the word for “brother” and “sister” is the same word: adik, meaning “brother.”
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