Indonesian phrasebook
Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) is the official language and lingua franca of Indonesia, and a common second language in Timor-Leste, where it is constitutionally designated a "working language". It is also spoken in places with a significant Indonesian diaspora such as Australia and the Netherlands. With over 230 million speakers, there are a lot of people to talk to in Indonesian. Many universities in Australia and Europe offer Indonesian language courses.
Indonesian is closely related to Malay, and speakers of either language can generally understand the other to a large degree. The main differences are in dialect, pronunciation and loan words: Indonesian has been mainly influenced by Dutch and regional languages like Javanese, Sundanese, etc., while Malay has been mainly influenced by English. Both languages have lots of loan words from Sanskrit, Tamil, Portuguese/Spanish (historically), various Chinese dialects (culinary, daily items), Arabic (especially for names of persons, days of the week, and religious concepts and vocabularies, Islamic and Christian), and English (technology, popular culture, etc.).
Indonesian is a relatively young language, generally said to have been born during the Youth Congress on 28 October 1928, but as the only official language in Indonesia since its independence in 1945, for more than 75 years it has produced numerous works of literature and formed its own character. Every Indonesian student must learn how to write and speak Indonesian, many as their second language. Indonesian society is highly diglossic (bilingual or trilingual), and many people freely switch back and forth from their mother tongue to Indonesian, and sometimes colloquial Jakartan dialects.
Indonesian uses the Latin alphabet system (26 basic letters and nothing else) and Arabic numerals (0-9). Indonesian people are used to typing with the QWERTY keyboard.
UnderstandWith over 230 million inhabitants dispersed in their local communities, the Indonesian language generally does not serve as a mother tongue, as most of its speakers' first languages are local to their region, such as…
Pronunciation guideIndonesian is very easy to pronounce: it has one of the most phonetic writing systems in the world, the most faithful to IPA, among major languages that uses Latin alphabet, with only a small number of simple consonants…
GrammarIndonesian sentences structure is subject-verb-object. It more or less resembles English, but with more rules to follow, it actually looks more like Spanish!
AbbreviationsOne legacy of the Sukarno-Suharto era still affecting Indonesia is an inordinate fondness for syllabic abbreviations, chosen more for pronounceability than logic or comprehensibility.
Differences with MalayMalay speakers beware, as there are multiple words that are spelled and pronounced the same but convey very different meanings (in linguistics, these are known as 'false friends'). Among the most familiar are:
Phrase listUnless noted as (informal), phrases in this phrasebook use the formal, polite Anda and saya forms for "you" and "I" respectively.
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Sources and licences
- Guide text adapted from the Wikivoyage article "Indonesian phrasebook" by its contributors, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read on Wikivoyage · Contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0