Introduction to Indonesian Language

Indonesia and Greater Melayunesian Archipelago

Bahasa Indonesia (so called Bahasa Melayu in Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei) is a predominantly language of Southeast Asia.

There are many features of easiness of Indonesian Language Learning:

1. All verbs completely do not conjugated based on numeral and subjective distinction; They have the equal form for all terms.

2. All nouns do not divided into particular gender; Masculine, Feminine and Neuter nouns do not exist in Indonesian. Marking for certain gender could be formed by putting the gender marker adjacent to the noun. Saudara (siblings) → Saudara laki-laki (brother), saudara perempuan (sister). Since both laki-laki (man) and perempuan (woman) are the Masculine and Feminine markers respectively.

3. All nouns do not declined to certain case; most of Indo-European Languages, Especially Slavic, Uralic and Germanic branches having their nouns declined to other forms, depending on their position as accusative, genitive, etc.

4. Mostly Indonesian vocabularies are derived from numerous languages. Arabic, Dutch and Sanskrit are prominent language derivation. As example, Indonesian has three words depicting book. Buku (Dutch), Pustaka (from Sanskrit), and Kitab (from Arabic). While buku is used denoting book generally. Pustaka denotes book as literature interpretation and Kitab denotes as religion’s holy book.

On the other side, Indonesian has such diabolical features:

1. Indonesian is an inflectional language, by means of three fundamental of part of speech (verb, noun, adjective) is agreed with prefix, suffix and affix. This affix is often considered as hard as it’s counterparts of European Language Cases and Verb Conjugation.

2. Colloquial Indonesian (CI) occasionaly much different to Standard Indonesian (SI). We can say “I want to go” on SI by “Saya hendak pergi” while on CI we will say “Gue mau cabut”. Gue is derived from local languages – Betawinese, and mau is a colloquial form of hendak – both mean “want”. While cabut in CI means go, when comes to SI, it would be mean “pull-something-out”

National flag of Republic of Indonesia, red stripe means bravery. while white ones means purity. This flag derived from ancient Indonesian kingdom’s banner – Called Majapahit Empire. The vast empire that existed by 15 centuries stretching from Philipines to Java, from Melayu peninsula to Papua. Republic of Singapore adopts the same flag, with five-stars and moon added to left edges of red stripe.