of African heritage; they mean Indonesian girls with darker complexions. There’s this idea—borne of the clichéd image of aging expats hooking up with youthful bargirls, who, as far as many Indonesians are concerned, look like they should be working in the rice fields—that all Western men actually have a preference for women with darker skin. For many middle class Indonesian girls—who spend a fortune on skin-whitening beauty products—it’s an utterly inexplicable notion. I always do my best to take the assertion in good humor, and to counter it by pointing out that it’s not that your average Western guy—or girl for that matter—has a preference for darker partners; it’s just that they don’t care about what color you are. I don’t think anyone ever believes me when I tell them this.
Speaking of forthright and inappropriate questions, they’re something you have to get used to as a foreigner in Indonesia. It’s not unusual, within five minutes of meeting someone for the first time, for them to have asked your age, your religion, and your monthly income—which in my country, Britain, are precisely the three questions you should never ask anyone! Ever! Maybe not even if you’re in a romantic relationship with them! There’s no point getting annoyed by this—they’re questions Indonesians are always asking each other. I usually try laughing, and good-naturedly explaining what terrible taboos those subjects are where I come from. People usually express very sincere interest in this piece of information. Then they ask me the three questions again…
Senior Indonesian and US military officers getting on fine during an international naval exercise.
A NATION OF LINGUISTS
Indonesia might be home to hundreds of different languages, but you only need to speak one of them to talk to people from the tip of Sumatra to the borders of Papua New Guinea: Bahasa Indonesia, otherwise known simply as “Indonesian”. But what is this language so many foreigners insist on calling “Bahasa”? Is it easy? And do Indonesians speak English?
Bahasa Indonesia means “Indonesian Language”. Bahasa just means “language”, so when, as so often happens, someone asks “do you speak Bahasa?” the logical response is “which one?” You can call it Bahasa Indonesia or you can call it Indonesian; but you shouldn’t call it “Bahasa”. Good to have that cleared up!
Indonesian was originally known as “Malay”, the native language of parts of Sumatra and what is now mainland Malaysia, but used as a lingua franca throughout the region for hundreds of years. During Indonesia’s struggle for independence from the Netherlands it was chosen as the national language and given its new name. Indonesian is part of the vast Austronesian language family, which spans the globe from Easter Island to Madagascar. It is gloriously acquisitive, having sucked up bits and pieces from Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, and English over the centuries. Modern Indonesian and the other versions of Malay spoken in Malaysia and Brunei are still more or less mutually comprehensible.
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”.
