Then, in the early 20th Century, Indonesian nationalists, plotting independence from Dutch colonial rule, agreed that a reformed version of Malay, with an expanded vocabulary and a new name – Bahasa Indonesia – should become the official language of the soon-to-be independent nation. It was the mother tongue of few, but as people travelled around the region, it became their accepted means to communicate. Malay was seen to be grammatically simple, non-hierarchical and easier to learn than other regional languages. The island that forever changed scienceīahasa Indonesia’s antecedent, Malay, evolved and spread during the last millennium because of the need in maritime South-East Asia – where hundreds of languages are still spoken across the thousands of islands that now comprise the modern nations of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore – for a lingua franca for trade and other exchanges.The addendum hadn’t struck me as overly important, but it should have. My teachers had referred to the language as ‘baku’, or ‘standard’, in class, emphasising that it was this version of Indonesian, the nation’s official language, we were learning. ‘ Bahasa Indonesia baku’, I thought to myself – textbook Bahasa Indonesia. She handed me my meal wrapped in newspaper, the text of which I could understand. I wondered what her life was like in this city, how she felt about escalating political and cultural tension in this young democracy and the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. I did make out familiar words, but painfully rarely. Yet after hundreds of hours of classes, I couldn’t understand what she was saying.Įverything she said sounded to me like it had half a syllable. It was to chat with people like her that I had moved to Indonesia and enrolled in intensive language study. She was curious about me, full of questions, and the feeling was mutual. Mixing everything in a peanut sauce, she handed the salad, called lotek, to customers who puttered up on motorbikes and waited on blue plastic stools.

The woman stood in her roadside stall in a quiet neighbourhood in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta, chopping tomatoes, beans and spinach, plus one red chilli.

Master sun bahasa indonesia