About Indonesian

by Pisith Phlong

Number of speakers
Indonesian is the official language of Indonesia. An estimated 180 million people speaks Indonesian or Bahasa Indonesia (in 1992), and about half of this number live on the island of Java. (Brown, Vol. 5, p.639)

Language group
Among the hundreds of dialects spoken in Indonesia, Indonesian is spoken by the largest group of Indonesia’s population. It is one of the Malayic languages, belonging to the Malayo-Polynesian group of the Austronesian language family. (Brown, Vol. 5, p. 640)

History of written language and script
The history of the Indonesian language is closely related to the Malaysian language. It developed from the Malay language which has long been spoken in the Indonesian archipelago since at least the 10th century. In 1928 the All Indonesian Youth Congress in Jakarta declared Malaysian language as the national language of Indonesia and named it the Indonesian language (Bahasa Indonesia). (Llamzon, p. 282-283). After gaining independence from the Dutch in 1945, the constitution of Indonesia officially pronounced Bahasa Indonesia as the state language.

Language
The Indonesian language has strong connections with the Malay language, which has been based in the Malay Archipelago for about 2000 years. The Malay language might have originated on Borneo Island before spreading to east and central Sumatra as well as to East Malaysia.  Over time many dialects formed in the region. (Brown, Vol. 7, p. 540) Through the Indian sea trade routes, Indian cultures began to influence Malay culture and brought about new civilizations with different kingdoms on the Sumatra and Java islands from the 7th century onward. Some examples of these are the Buddhist temple of Borobodur, the Hindu Prambanan, the Sri Vijaya kingdom, the glorious culture of Majapahit in east Java, and the important cultural center of Bali. (Herbert, p. 123) The Malay-Indonesian language can be dated back to about the 7th century in south-central Sumatra, the area called Jambi and Palembang, associated with the Sri Vijaya kingdom.   Here the earliest written records on inscriptions were found and written in scripts deriving from the Pallava scripts of India. These earlier inscriptions used the Sanskrit language and it is commonly considered to have influenced the Old Malay language, though some scholars do not agree. Old Malay spread into Java and The Philippines, where it didn’t survive for long. In Sumatra, Old Malay continued developing and served as a major literary language among the indigenous people. By the 14th century, Islam spread into the North Sumatra and Java and became a dominant religion in North Java by the 15th century; however, Bali still preserved its Hindu roots. With the introduction of Islam, Arabic language gained status and influence over the Old Malay. In the early 16th century, the Portuguese arrived in the Malay Archipelago for the spice trade in the Moluccas, while the Dutch came about a century later. (Herbert, p.123)  It was in the 16th century that many forms of writing such as legends, chronicles, religious treatises, legal documents and letters began to use standardized Malay, called Classical Malay, which evolved through time and space from the Old Malay language. (Strazny, Vol. 2, p. 645) From the 17th century till the early 18th century, the Dutch East India Company (the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or V. O. C) came into Indonesia and started its colonization from 1749 onward. Due to an agreement between the British and the Dutch in 1824, a new boundary was drawn, and the division of the Riau-Johore Kingdom into Malaysia and Indonesia happened, by which the Malay peninsula fell under British control and Sumatra fell under Dutch control. (Brown, Vol. 7, p. 451) It was not until 1928 that Indonesia declared Malay as the national language of Indonesia, under the name Bahasa Indonesia or Indonesian language and pronounced it as the state language of Indonesia after independence from the Dutch in 1945. For this reason, Malay and Indonesian are still closely related to one another, except for the fact that the Malay language includes more British loanwords and retains more Arabic words, and Indonesian receives more influence from Dutch and retains more Javanese and Jakarta Malay. (Brown, Vol. 7, p. 451; Strazny, Vol. 2, p. 641, 645)

Scripts
The international trade and religious connections brought three kinds of scripts into the history of the Malaysian-Indonesian writing: scripts derived from the Indian scripts, Arabic scripts and Roman scripts. (Herbert, p. 127) The earliest record was the Kutai inscription of East Kalimantan in Sanskrit at about 400AD, written in Pallava script. The Pallava script influenced the system of the Malay-Indonesian writing, until the arrival of Islam in the 14th century which introduced Arabic scripts into Indonesia. Arabic is now still used in Islamic texts. From the 17th century, Malay-Indonesian writing systems began to be replaced by the Roman script with the influence from the British and Dutch presence in the Southeast Asia through colonization. (Strazny, Vol. 2, p. 646)

Other Dialects 
Besides Bahasa Indonesia, which is now spoken widely in Indonesia, there are between 200 to 400 other dialects spoken as local dialects in Indonesia.  Most dialects belong to the Austronesian language family, except the dialects spoken in Irian Jaya and other parts of Eastern Indonesia which are Austroasiatic. (Herbert, p. 123) Among these, the major popular dialects are 1) Javanese. spoken in central and east Java by about 70 million people; 2) Sundanese, spoken in west Java by about 25 million people; 3) Madurese, spoken in Madura and east Java by about 9 million people; 4) Minangkabau, spoken in west Sumatra by about 6 to 7 million people; 5) Batak, spoken in north Sumatra by about 5.5 million people, 6) Balinese, spoken in Bali by about 3 million people; 7) Acehnese, spoken in north Sumatra by about 2.2 million people; 8) Sasak, spoken in Lombok by about 1.5 million people. (Brown, Vol. 5, p. 640; Herbert, p. 125)

Comparison to other Western languages
Indonesia is similar to the Western languages in that its sentence structure is arranged in Subject-Verb-Object order and the syllables are formed by consonants and vowels of the Roman scripts. Words are usually made by adding prefix, suffix, reduplication, and clipping, as well as borrowing from English and Dutch. (Strazny, Vol. 2, p. 645)

References

• Brown, K. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Volume 5. (2nd ed.). Oxford: Elsevier, 2006.
• Frawley, W. J. International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Vol. 2. (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Strazny, P. Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Vol. 2. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2005.
• Herbert, P. and Milner, A. Southeast Asia, Languages and Literatures. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989.
• LLamzon, T. A. Papers on Southeast Asian Languages: an Introduction to the Languages of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailandu>. Singapore University Press, 1979,
• Kratz, E. U. Southeast Asian Languages and Literatures: A Bibliographical Guide to Burmese, Cambodian, Indonesian, Javanese, Malay, Minangkabau, Thai and Vietnamese. London, New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 1996,