Indonesian language is the official language of Indonesia. It is a standardized register of Malay, an Austronesian language that has been used as a lingua franca in the multilingual Indonesian archipelago for centuries. Indonesia is the fourth most populous nation in the world. Of its large population, the majority speak Indonesian, making it one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.

Have you ever heard of Bali? Though Bali is a part of Indonesia, they have their own Balinese language. There are also Javanese, Sundanese, etc. This show how rich Indonesia culture really are.

Source: Giphy.com

According to Indonesian law, the Indonesian language was proclaimed as the unifying language during Sumpah Pemuda on 28 October 1928, developed further to accommodate the dynamics of Indonesian civilization.

Since its conception in 1928 and its official recognition in 1945 Constitution, the Indonesian language has been loaded with a nationalist political agenda to unify Indonesia. This status has made the Indonesian language relatively open to accommodate influences from other Indonesian ethnic languages, most notably Javanese as the majority ethnic group in Indonesia, and Dutch as the previous colonizer.

Compared to the Malay language spoken as the native regional language in Sumatra and Malay peninsula or the standardized version of the Malaysian language, the Indonesian language differs profoundly by a large amount of Javanese loanwords incorporated into its already rich vocabulary. As a result, Indonesian has wider sources of loanwords, compared to Malay.

It was suggested that the Indonesian language is an artificial language made official in 1928. By artificial, it means that Indonesian was designed by academics rather than evolving naturally as most common languages have in order to accommodate the political purpose of establishing an official unifying language of Indonesia.

By borrowing heavily from numerous other languages it expresses a natural linguistic evolution; in fact, it is as natural as the next language, as demonstrated in its exceptional capacity for absorbing foreign vocabulary.

Do you know Indonesian has a light stress that falls on either the final or penultimate syllable?

There is some disagreement among linguists over whether stress is phonemic (unpredictable), with some analyses suggesting that there is no underlying stress in Indonesian.

The classification of languages based on rhythm can be problematic. Nevertheless, acoustic measurements suggest that Indonesian has more syllable-based rhythm than British English.

Many linguists suggest that rhytm in Indonesian is not payed because Indonesian is not a kind of tonal language like Chinese or Thai.

Word order in Indonesian is not hard. It is generally follow SVO (subject-verb-object), similar to that of most modern European languages, such as English. But considerable flexibility in word ordering exists, in contrast with languages like Japanese or Korean, for instance, which always end clauses with verbs. Indonesian also doesn’t use grammatical gender.

Indonesian is written with the Latin script. It was originally based on the Dutch spelling and still bears some similarities to it. Consonants are represented in a way similar to Italian.

Some spelling also changes in the language that have occurred since Indonesian independence, as you can see below:

Letter names and pronunciations
The Indonesian alphabet is exactly the same as in English.

Indonesia is an archipelagic country. It is composed of some 17.500 islands, of which more than 7000 are uninhabited. This means, there will be lots of difference in culture and language.

Indonesia also well known for its beauty of nature. If you love traveling and love to see great scenery, then this is the country for you to go.

Have you ever heard of rendang? This is only one of many tasty cuisines Indonesia has.

We have great holiday places and great tasty food, spicy food too. If you are interested in this, let’s learn Bahasa Indonesia language together with Squline and take your great holiday in Indonesia. Enjoy our beautiful nature without any language barrier.