THE BAHASA GAUL MAELSTROM
Formal Indonesian as taught in schools is a stiff and starchy affair, but it has a maniacal younger sibling by the name of Bahasa Gaul, which means something like “Social” or “Friendly” language. At its more accessible end, Bahasa Gaul is just the colloquial version of Indonesian that people of all ages speak in casual situations, and it’s fairly easy to get to grips with its basic features. Grammar gets simplified; words get abbreviated; first letters get dropped so that the much-used word sudah, “already”, turns into udah. Final-syllable A turns into E, so benar, “true”, becomes bener; and the expressive particles loh, kok, dong, and sih get used incessantly.
Is Indonesian an Easy Language to Learn?
It’s a statement you hear all the time from foreigners who can just about order a beer in Bahasa Indonesia: “Indonesian is the easiest language in the world!” And it’s a statement that drives those who have spent years learning the language to distraction.
The idea that Indonesian is somehow uniquely easy is down to a few of its distinctive features. Like some other Asian languages, its verbs are not conjugated to create tenses, which leads to the misconception that it has no tenses at all. It has no genders; its pronouns are fixed; there are none of the tones that pose such a challenge to foreign students of Chinese; and it is written in the Roman alphabet using a delightfully consistent spelling system. Finally, there’s the fact that Indonesians are remarkably tolerant of fumbling foreigners, and very good at modifying their own speech for the sake of beginners. All this means that Indonesian really is an unusually accessible language for those wanting to learn a basic travelers’ pidgin in a relatively short space of time. But it doesn’t, unfortunately, mean it’s “the easiest language in the world”.
When I first came to live in Indonesia, I already had a decent grasp on the basics, thanks to three previous bouts of backpacking in the country. I was convinced that I was just a few months away from perfect fluency. In truth, I had just about reached the edge of the very wide plateau of basic functional competency, and it would be years before I could comfortably read an Indonesian newspaper or follow the plot of a sinetron.
Getting to the far side of that plateau requires a long hard slog. First up, unlike French, Spanish—or even Farsi or Hindi—Indonesian has absolutely no direct structural relationship with English, and precious little by way of common vocabulary. If you’re a native English-speaker you have to learn everything from scratch, and much of it is at total odds with the hardwired concepts of your own mother tongue. And then you’re faced with the overblown complexities of formal Indonesian on the one hand, and the devilish ultra-colloquialism of Bahasa Gaul on the other. This is why there are so very, very few foreigners, even from amongst the expats who’ve been in the country for decades, who can truly shoot the Bahasa Indonesia breeze like a native…
But stray any further into the realm of Bahasa Gaul as spoken by hip young Indonesians, and you’ll encounter a terrifying maelstrom of flying particles, extreme abbreviations, agglutinations, inversions, and odd bits of English chewed up and spat back out in radically modified form. It’s a linguistic wall of white noise, fit to send any earnest foreign student of Indonesian fleeing in terror.
The most striking thing about this Bahasa Gaul is its sheer dynamism. It was always a rapidly evolving sort of street talk, but modern social media has given its transformative capacity a massive steroids hit, so it now shifts and reinvents itself at ridiculous speed. It’s a brilliantly exciting manifestation of Indonesia’s linguistic vibrancy, even if it is pretty much impossible to keep up with.
DO INDONESIANS SPEAK ENGLISH?
Educated, urban Indonesians sometimes get a bit offended when foreigners assume that Indonesians can’t speak English. But though there is a tiny Jakarta-based elite who speak it at pretty much first-language level, the fact of the matter is, English just isn’t spoken as widely or as well in Indonesia as it is in countries like Malaysia or India. That’s not Indonesia’s fault; it’s down to colonial history.
“Our City is Ready for Disasters”: public education street art in Bahasa Indonesia.
“Please take your ticket”.
When translation goes wrong: the Indonesian phrase here really means “stay away from drugs”!
Still, Indonesians definitely want to be able to speak English, and if you’re a foreigner wandering in a place popular with tourists—Bogor’s Botanic Gardens, Jakarta’s Fatahillah Square, or the Borobudur temple—you will be pounced upon by gangs of students looking to practice their English skills. And they seem to be getting somewhere. English is definitely now more widely spoken than when I first came to Indonesia, and in the last couple of years I’ve started hearing trendy young Indonesians speaking English amongst themselves in cafés and shopping malls. Social media and the Internet has had a lot to do with this—the posts and comments on the average Indonesian Facebook page these days come in a glorious mishmash of English, regional languages, and Bahasa Gaul.
An Archipelago of Languages
Bahasa Indonesia might be spoken from one end of the country to the other, but it’s just the start when it comes to Indonesia’s linguistic make-up. There are something like 700 local languages, plus infinite dialects. The big regional languages are spoken by millions of people, and the biggest, Javanese, with nearly 100 million, has more native speakers than French. Others are the preserve of a vanishing handful. The little island of Alor in East Nusa Tenggara Province is home to just 150,000 people, but it has 15 distinct languages!
INDONESIA: THE SOCIAL MEDIA CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
A few years back I spent a night hanging out with a bunch of local mystics at an ancient temple in the mountainous wilds of East Java. Sitting outside a bamboo shack, only an oil lamp to stave off the velvety darkness, they talked to me of supernatural energy and invisible realms. It was the sort of thing that foreign travel writers love to think of as “the real Indonesia”. By the time I got back to Surabaya the next day, three of the amulet-toting mystics had added me on Facebook…
Yogyakarta school kids getting online.
When I first traveled in Indonesia, “Internet” generally meant a bank of rickety old desktops in a warnet—a warung Internet, or “Internet café”—with appalling connection speeds. But these days the whole country sizzles with digital connectivity. There are housewives on Twitter and grannies on WhatsApp, and an army of commuters furiously updating their statuses in the midst of the Jakarta rush hour each morning.
INDONESIANS ONLINE
Go into just about any café in the country—from a rickety roadside coffee stall in rural Sumatra to a branch of J.CO (like Starbucks, only with added donuts) in a Jakarta shopping mall, and look at the customers. As each newcomer takes his or her seat there’s an audible clunk. It’s the sound of a weighty bit of Internet-ready mobile technology hitting the table where it has to sit, in line of sight at all times.
As in many countries with less than perfect infrastructure, lots of people in Indonesia skipped the stage of home Internet connection