Follow Langfocus on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Langfocus channel
and my name is Paul. Today's topic is the Indonesian language
or Bahasa Indonesia as it's called in Indonesian. Indonesian is closely connected with Malay. So; if you haven't seen my video on the Malay language yet,
I recommend that you watch that first before you watch this video. Indonesian is based on Malay, though it has evolved
and taken on some uniquely indonesian features. There are about 43 million native speakers of Indonesian
and about 155 million second language speakers of Indonesian, mainly in Indonesia where it's the national language
and the sole official language. Why does Indonesian have so many more
second language speakers than native speakers? Well, there are hundreds of languages spoken in Indonesia
and Indonesian functions as a lingua franca
between speakers of different languages. It's the language of education and of media
and these days everybody learns Indonesian. But most Indonesians still speak
a different regional language as their native language. Plus, Indonesian, the national language. How was the Indonesian language born? Indonesian is based on the Malay language
which has been a lingua franca of trade and of the elite
throughout the Malay Archipelago for centuries. The story of Indonesian begins during the colonial period. In the early 17th century, the VOC
or the Dutch East India company established
a trading post at Batavia, the site of present-day Jakarta and over the following three centuries expanded
into other areas of present-day Indonesia. The Dutch East India company made Malay
the administrative language of its trading outpost. In 1799, the Dutch East India company went bankrupt
and the Dutch government took control of the colony. In the late 18th century, the British East India Company
had also arrived in the archipelago. and in 1824, a treaty between the British and the Dutch
divided the area between the British to the north
and the Dutch to the south. In the Dutch colony, the promotion of the Dutch language and
education in Dutch began but only to a limited extent,
mostly for the elite. Compared to other colonial powers,
the Dutch were not really interested
in changing the culture of the colonized people. Their main goal was to facilitate trade. Therefore since Malay was already
a lingua franca that could facilitate trade, there was no reason for them
to introduce Dutch as a lingua franca. Dutch promoted Malay as the language of education,
recognizing "Riau Malay", the classical Malay spoken
in the Malacca and Johor Sultanates,
as the standard language. The standard form of Malay continued to develop with the abundance of Malay literature in the 19th century and in the 20th century, Malay linguists
published dictionaries and grammars to further
standardize and modernize the language. The Dutch language never became widespread in Indonesia. In fact, in 1940, only 2% of Indonesians spoke Dutch . But, even though the role of the Dutch language was very limited,
a large number of Dutch loanwords entered
the Malay language in the areas under Dutch control. and this is one of the things that made the Indonesian
variety of Malay different from other varieties. In the early 20th century, a pro-independence movement arose
and people throughout the Dutch colony began
to see themselves as a single people, Indonesians. The term Indonesia was a new term for the archipelago,
created by European ethnologists
but adopted by nationalists in the Dutch colony. At the youth conference of 1928, young nationalists
declared the Youth Pledge, with three ideals:
one motherland, one nation and one language. The language they chose was the Indonesian variety
of Malay, which they named "Bahasa Indonesia". When Indonesia declared independence in 1945,
Indonesian was declared the national language
of the new country. But why "Indonesian"? At the time of independence, Indonesian was
the native language of only 5% of the population, while Javanese was the native language
of over 40% of the population. So, why wasn't Javanese chosen
to be the national language? Well, that would have shown favoritism
to Indonesia's largest ethnic group
undermining the national unity of the country. But Indonesian previously known just as Malay had been
a lingua franca throughout the archipelago for centuries. So people in various regions of the country already knew some Malay. It was also a much simpler language than Javanese
and could realistically be learned by millions of people
as a second language. Indonesian turned out to be the right choice, successfully
becoming the language of government, education, trade
and communication between people in
different regions of the country. Indonesian completely replaced the former colonial language Dutch as the language of public life
and that's something that's very rare in former colonies. Today, Indonesian is still the second language
of most Indonesian people. But it's becoming increasingly more common
as a native language, especially in the cities. That's because people from all over the country
moved to the big cities. So, rather than speak their native
regional languages, they speak Indonesian instead. Some of them get married with each other
and they raise their children speaking
Indonesian as their primary language. So, what is Indonesian like? Well, undoubtedly, one of the things that made Indonesian
so successful as a national language so quickly
was its simplicity. If you've seen my video on Malay, then you're already
familiar with the simplicity of Indonesian. Because, in its standard form, it's very close to
standard Malay, just with some different vocabulary. Here are some features of Indonesian. Indonesian has simple phonology and orthography.
In general, one letter represents just one sound. Indonesian has simple SVO sentence structure.
There are no case inflections in Indonesian. There's also no grammatical gender in Indonesian. There's no plural form in Indonesian
and explicit plurals are made by republication. Reduplication meaning that you repeat the word again. And perhaps, best of all: no verb conjugations. Let's look at a few Indonesian sentences
and we'll identify some of those features. This sentence means :
"They are cooking eggs for breakfast" Word-for-word it's
They - now - cook - egg - for - breakfast. We can see that the sentence is SVO.
(N.B. : SVO = Subject - verb - object). As I said before, there are no verb conjugations.
So how do we know that this action is happening now? Well, it's because of this word right here: "sedang" This is an adverb that indicates
that something is happening right now. You can change the tense of the verb,
by changing this adverb. Here's another sentence. After changing the word "sedang" to "sudah",
the sentence now means: "They cooked eggs
for breakfast", in the past tense. The adverb "sudah" means something like "already"
and shows that an action has been completed. How about the future tense? Here "akan" is the future adverb. Another example. This means:
"Like me, he often travels to Lombok". Word-for-word, it's :
Like - I - he - often - (to) travel - to - Lombok Another example: This means : "Do you want to sit?" "Apa" is a yes-or-no question marker. So word-for-word, it's : question - you - want - sit But "Apa" is often left out in speech. And notice that to express desire,
you can just add "mau" right before another verb. The second verb doesn't change its form at all. Another example. This means:
"I write letters from my friend" Word-for-word, it's :
I - write - letter - for - friend - I Notice that the word for "letters" : "surat"
is the same as the singular form. Also notice that possession is shown by placing
a personal pronoun right after a noun. "teman saya" literally "friend - I" means "my friend"
This makes it quite easy to form possessives. Another example This means "I don't like eating peanuts" Word-for-word, it's I - no - like - eat - peanut.
So we negate a sentence by adding "tidak" before the verb. And notice that similar to the word "mau", which means "want",
we can express "like" by placing the word "suka"
right before another verb. This means "The peanuts have already been eaten" Word by word, it's "peanuts - already - be aten',
the verb dimakan is a passive. Let's take a look at some of the verbs
from the above sentences. You can see that these Indonesian verbs have
two parts: a root in black and an affix in red. Indonesian has many such affixes that are added
to roots to make verbs and nouns. One example, the root : "tulis", meaning "to write" (root). We have = "to write" (infinitive) "to be written" "to be written" "something that's written" "to write something down" "a writer" "the process of writing" "to have (...) written on it" "with the writing or words". You can see more examples of such affixes
in my video on Malay which functions in the same way. Affixes are the most challenging part of learning
Indonesian at least for a lot of learners. But you can make use of that feature of the roots
and affixes to help you learn new words
through their connections with other words. Standard Indonesian really is a simple language,
compared to other languages. But that's standard indonesian which is normally
used as the written language and in formal contexts. The way Indonesian is spoken in daily life is
often fairly different from standard Indonesian. Different varieties of colloquial Indonesian are spoken
around the country and they're influenced by
the local native language in that area. These different varieties of Indonesian
are referred to as "Bahasa Gaul". The Bahasa Gaul of Jakarta is influenced by
Betawi, the Malay creole language that's native to Jakarta, as well as by Javanese and Sundanese,
since people from all over Indonesia move to Jakarta. Let's look at the Bahasa Gaul of Jakarta and see
how it differs from standard Indonesian. Here's a sentence we looked at before. Now in Bahasa Gaul : The first difference we see is that the word "sedang"
which indicates present tense is "lagi" in Bahasa Gaul "lagi" is also used in standard Indonesian
to mean "again" or "still",
but it's not used as a present tense marker like this. Another difference is that the verb "memasak" is used
in its root form "masak" without the prefix Then we have a sound difference in the word "telur",
which becomes like "telor". And then, "untuk" becomes "buat",
which can be used in standard Indonesian
but the meaning is more like "in order to" In Bahasa Gaul, you can use it to simply mean "for". Now in Bahasa Gaul : Here notice that the word "sudah" is reduced to "udah". Now in Bahasa Gaul : Here notice that the future marker "akan"
becomes "bakal" Another example: Now in Bahasa Gaul : The first difference here is that the word "seperti", meaning "like", changes to "kayak" Then notice that "saya" becomes "gue",
which is a loanword from betawi. And "berlibur" becomes "liburan".
The root is the same but the affixes are different. In this example, we'll see two variations of Bahasa Gaul. The first variation is a simple casual sentence. Notice that the yes-or-no question marker "apa" isn't there. Instead, at the end, you see "gak",
which means "no" in Bahasa Gaul. So it's like "You want to sit, no?" The second variation is used for close friends
or people the same age as you or younger. The second person pronoun is "Lu", which I believe
is a loanword from Chinese which is present
in the betawi creole language of Jakarta. In this example, let's look at some options
for first-person pronouns. In a casual-polite sentence,
you use "saya" even in Bahasa Gaul. In a more casual familiar sentence, "aku" is used. And when aku is used as a possessive,
a shortened form is attached to the end of the noun. In a more intimate sentence, "gua" or "gue" is used. Also notice that "menulis" loses its prefix,
but it doesn't revert to its root form "tulis" Instead, it maintains the nasal sound at the beginning. And one more small difference we can see is that
the word for friend "teman" is pronounced more like "temen". And another example: Now in Bahasa Gaul : Again here we see the pronoun "gua"
and we see that the negative "tidak" becomes "nggak"
which is related to the word "gak" which we saw before. And in Bahasa Gaul, "suka" sometimes becomes "demen". And one last example: Now in Bahasa Gaul : Here the only difference is that "sudah" becomes "udah",
as we saw before. So you can see that the colloquial Indonesian of Jakarta
is fairly different from standard indonesian. And there are varieties like this spoken
around the country. The influence of the other languages of Indonesia
on colloquial Indonesian is one of the things that
sets the language apart from other varieties of Malay. Indonesian is definitely a fun language to study and
communicating with Indonesians in their national language
and lingua franca is an amazing experience. The question of the day for Indonesians: To what extent do you speak standard Indonesian
and to what extent do you speak Bahasa Gaul
and in what situations? Leave your comments down below. And for learners of indonesian: what's been your
experience communicating with Indonesian people? Do you find the standard Indonesian
that you learn at textbooks to be useful? Or do you feel like you should be learning
more of the language as it's really spoken? Be sure to follow Langfocus
on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And again I'd like to say "thank you very much" to
my patreon supporters, especially the ones right here
on the screen for their monthly pledges. Thank you very much and have a nice day.
Paul is really good, i love his vids
Lu / gue is from chinese? Is that true? Wow, TIL.
By the way Bahasa means language 12:28
I love this guy already.
This video probably has the best comment section in all of Youtube. I learned a lot of stuff from there
Question here: at some point he says "Apa Kamu mau duduk?". Shouldn't it be "Apakah Kamu mau duduk?"? Can someone explain the difference?
This video is actually really good. As an Indonesian, I learned a lot of new stuff that I have never thought of before by watching this video.