The article's premise is that it seems like nobody in Indonesia speaks Bahasa Indonesia well, because it's always a second language. I can't find a good reference right now, but I think that's wrong. I'm under the impression that in Jakarta and the surrounding areas (probably tens of millions of people) Bahasa Indonesia really is spoken as a first language. I think this area has historically been Malay-speaking anyway, and modern Indonesian is very closely related to Malay, so this wouldn't be a big stretch.
I'm Indonesian. Lots of people have Bahasa Indonesia as their first language, especially in the cities. Unless you go to the remote areas, you practically won't find people who can't speak Indonesian.
In fact, it's the use of regional languages like Sundanese which is diminishing. I could really feel the skill and the vocabulary range of even the native Sundanese are worse than 10-20 years ago. Lots of mixing with Indonesian vocabulary without knowing the Sundanese words.
I think the author's perspective is skewed because he's living in Yogya, which is, and has been for a long time, the center of a large and prestigious culture. Yogyakartans don't need to speak Indonesian unless they're dealing with the government.
It's very different if your native language is only spoken by a small number of people and / or isn't very prestigious.
Then there is, like you said, the capital, Jakarta, where non-Indonesian languages are only spoken at home (or not at all).
And I know for a fact there are is at least one region - but there's probably more - where the local language has pretty much died out. Minahasans, from Northen Sulawesi, no longer speak Minahasan languages, they speak Indonesian.
In Jakarta the people speak Bahasa and Javanese equally. People who have come in from other areas of the country speak their own language plus Bahasa; the Javanese who were born there make Javanese the most common language.
Malay and Bahasa are 90% the same language. Bahasa is considered a traders' language, much like Swahili - a lingua franca that allowed commerce to happen for centuries.
Source: studied bahasa for two years and used to live on Java - amazing, complex place.
I wouldn't quite say "equally". Jakarta is a melting pot and the most significant portion of the population there is of Javanese descent. But many many people who are of Javanese descent don't even speak Javanese, especially if they were born in Jakarta or in the western part of Java.
It seems likely to me that people who are speaking Indonesian as a first language (e.g. Jakartans) have a substantially larger vocabulary than those that are speaking it as a second language (e.g. Yogyakartans). I would presume so, but that makes me wonder what the source of that larger vocabulary -- Malay? Javanese? English? Other languages native to the Indonesian archipelago? All of the above?
> It seems likely to me that people who are speaking Indonesian as a first language (e.g. Jakartans) have a substantially larger vocabulary than those that are speaking it as a second language (e.g. Yogyakartans).
They are speaking Indonesian as a second native language, they will acquire Javanese and Indonesian at the same time but use Javanese in conversation and Indonesian when consuming TV, books and in school. So their grasp of formal Indonesian is going to depend mostly on education level.
As for colloquial Indonesian, due to the internet new colloquialisms spread much more rapidly to other parts of Indonesia. So it probably depends on how old said Yogyakartan is.
> I'm under the impression that in Jakarta and the surrounding areas (probably tens of millions of people) Bahasa Indonesia really is spoken as a first language.
No, they speak daily Indonesian. If an Indonesian spoke formal Indonesian it would be comparable to an English-speaker speaking lawyerese (imagine someone sounding like a EULA).
Some things I learned when I was in Singapore and Indonesia about 10 years ago:
- Our Singaporean host had business dealings in Indonesia and he said he could get by just relying on his Malay language skills, so it seems that Malay and Bahasa Indonesia have a decent degree of mutual intelligibility.
- In one of the national museums we ran into an American professor who had been teaching part time in Indonesia for many years. Among other things, he mentioned that when Indonesia was founded, the government created a standard vocabulary for the language at the same time. He thought that that was one of the smartest things they'd done.
- One Indonesian woman that I spoke with (who I presume was Javanese) mentioned that one of the benefits of Bahasa Indonesia was that the Javanese in one village might not be mutually intelligible (in the practical sense, anyway) with the Javanese spoken in another village a few miles away. But you could always switch to Bahasa Indonesia to communicate.
- The word "Bahasa" means "language", and in Indonesian languages always seemed to be prefixed with ""Bahasa", e.g. "bahasa Indonesia", "bahasa Inggris", "bahasa Jerman". However, I recall several times hearing Indonesians using just the word "bahasa" when clearly referring to the Indonesian language. This was speaking in English though, so it might not be representative of how they'd say it in Indonesian.
Malay and Indonesian language are like British and American English, except with far more difference in vocabulary and far more false cognates. Although not nearly as different as, say, Portuguese and Spanish.
Yes, a typical Malaysian or Singaporean (especially if he has native or near native Malay language skill) will be able to order food at restaurants, buy stuffs, ask for directions, and even converse with an Indonesian speaker, albeit with awkwardness every so often. But for serious or technical discussion, the conversers might as well switch to English for better communication, even if they both only have moderate level of English.
Yeah malay does my head in (I speak ok Behasa Baku, and I can usually make sense of dialecty Behasa Indonesia). However with malay it's like you can be having a totally intelligible conversation, except every 7th word you say is entirely wrong.
>the Javanese in one village might not be mutually intelligible (in the practical sense, anyway) with the Javanese spoken in another village a few miles away.
>The word "Bahasa" means "language", and in Indonesian languages always seemed to be prefixed with ""Bahasa", e.g. "bahasa Indonesia", "bahasa Inggris", "bahasa Jerman".
It is probably derived from the Sanskrit word "bhaashaa" (writing it phonetically, if that is the correct term), since Indians had traveled to and culturally influenced parts of S.E. Asia in earlier centuries. Singapore (the name itself is from singha-pura which means lion city), Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, all have a lot of Indian cultural influence, not only in the sense of Buddhism, but words in the language, for people and place names, food ingredient influences and other things.
It's quite interesting, really, for me, as an Indian, because as I read various topics about those regions, which I keep doing now and then, I keep coming across such words and other influences that I can recognize as having something to do with India. Of course, that sort of reading (about any country) is interesting even without such influences existing :)
I don't know much about Sanskrit's history, but the linguistic similarities don't infer its influence on SE Asian languages. The influence could have gone the other way, from SE Asia to India (really, to South Asia; modern India's borders are a 20th century innovation, and Sanskrit seems to originate in Punjab, straddling modern India and Pakistan[0]) - and probably the influence would have gone both ways. Also, a third party could have influenced both, leaving them with similar vocabulary, and often influences are very indirect, such as Sanskrit's influence on European languages - it wasn't due to lots of Sanskrit speakers vacationing in France.
The Tamil kings of India had great influence on SE Asia during the Chola period.(1,2) Sanskrit was certainly used in SE Asia(3). Mostly ceremonial like Latin and used only by the ruling class I think
Can be, sure. My saying that there was influence in one direction did not rule out it happening the other way as well Good point.
>often influences are very indirect, such as Sanskrit's influence on European languages - it wasn't due to lots of Sanskrit speakers vacationing in France.
Sure. I did not claim that. In fact, I've read a bit about the common features of Indian and European languages, etc. - and you can detect it too, if you listen to, or read, stuff in both Indian and European languages - e.g. mater (Latin) ~ mata (Sanskrit), pater (Latin) ~ pita (Sanskrit), hundreds more words that seem to sound similar or have a common root which historians say is due to the common Proto-Indo-European roots of both, which is the topic of a descendant (but really ancestor :) link of the one you posted: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Indo-European-languages
Not sure how true all of that is, though. I have a healthy skepticism about historians, particularly when they cross-quote each other, and make claims about the past that almost sound like they were present there at the time :) And another reason is how the heck can they know all that they claim to, about things so long ago.
> Not sure how true all of that is, though. I have a healthy skepticism about historians
Is that supposed to be an argument against it? Have you examined the arguments and evidence, which thousands of experts have examined and been convinced by? What exactly do you object to?
> Have you examined the arguments and evidence, which thousands of experts have examined and been convinced by?
Which "thousands of experts", are you referring to, exactly?
Sure, there could be many thousands of "expert" historians. My point is, have you personally "examined the arguments and evidence" of those thousands of experts, who you claim have been convinced by said evidence? If not, why are you arguing on their behalf?
>What exactly do you object to?
I'm objecting to the fact that some of them (whose claims I have read in history or Sanskrit courses I studied in school), state things about people and events of centuries ago, as though they know for sure that those things happened in the way they claim - without providing evidence, except for their assertions, which anyone can make.
That's why I have a healthy skepticism about them.
And if you are asking me if I have examined the evidence of those historians, what is your evidence for making this statement (in an earlier comment above, by you)? :
>it wasn't due to lots of Sanskrit speakers vacationing in France.
It may be true or false, but have you examined the evidence for it, if any? If not, how are you saying it categorically, and questioning my doing the same on another point (about historians)?
Who determines that they are experts? You? If so, are you more qualified than them, so that you can determine that they are experts? Where's your evidence for being a better expert than those "thousands of experts"?
I find this fascinating too. From where I live, I've noticed and started learning more about Sanskrit's influence on European and Slavic languages. Maybe if I studied Sanskrit, it could help me learn more languages quicker, with a somewhat common vocabulary of root words.
Sanskrit and most European languages do share a common ancestor. But Sanskrit is not that common ancestor, and the influence of Sanskrit itself on European languages is trivial, mostly limited to words relating to Indian religions, yoga, and so on.
I think this confusion arose because it was similarities between Greek, Latin and Sanskrit that first alerted scholars to the existence of a common ancestor.
Cool. You should go for it. Having studied Sanskrit earlier for some years, I can say that it is a fun and interesting language to learn, and also not very difficult, since the grammar is very regular and systematic.
(That's a scholarly article, don't go by it, though you could skim it, just giving it for background info. Try out the language instead.)
There are a handful of rules, and the rest of the stuff builds upon that, the way programs build upon the handful of syntax and semantic rules about statements in programming language.
An interesting point mentioned in the article is that "Word order is free" in Sanskrit.
While not a linguist myself, I've noticed that the meanings of sentences in Sanskrit seem to be intelligible and mean the same, even if you switch some of the words around. I don't know if that is true for any other languages.
I wonder if that point has any connection with the concept of context-free grammars.
People in America really don't appreciate the blessing of having a single (nearly) uniformly spoken language. Being able to drop in anywhere in a country of 300+ million people and being able to converse with the locals (not just communicate, but convey your deepest thoughts)--it's a benefit the vast majority of people in the world simply do not have.
This article touches on something I've been thinking a lot about lately--the deepness of language. I think people have this vision of a polyglot future with automatic computer translation. I think that's quite short sighted and misses how deep language goes. My mom, who was born in Bangladesh, learned English in school and moved to the U.S. as an adult. Though she has been in the U.S. for thirty years, she will never be able to communicate in English with the level of sophistication she does in Bengali. Indeed, even we (her family who know better) perceive her as someone capable of a limited range of thinking as a result of the limited range of what she can express verbally in English.
All that resulted in quite a shock for us when she started using Facebook. On Facebook, she can sit and mull things over and think about what she wants to say. So we'll be taken aback by her posts quoting Dostoevsky or whatever (she was a voracious reader of classic literature translated into Bengali). It's a stark example how hobbling it can be to be forced to communicate in a language that is not one's own (an idea the article delves into). It also makes me skeptical of any idea that we can establish meaningful communications built on automated translation.
There's also a lot to be said for shared institutions like government, religion, retail and media. You can drive to the other coast, and during your four or five-day journey, you will decent roads and useful signage; truck stops from same 5 chains (in truth, only 3 different companies) with reliable bathrooms, fuel, and drinks; restaurants from the same dozen chains serving familiar food; Walmarts where you can be in Richfield, Utah or Ermine, Kentucky and you find the same Lay's chips, the same Progresso or Campbell's soup, the same Colgate and Oral-B toothbrush, the same flatscreen TVs, the same video games. You pay with the same cash or card, you have the same return policy. When talking to people, you can talk about the same high-profile domestic sports teams, invoke recent pop culture events, or federal politics, and they'll have something to say.
There's swaths of the US that are far off the beaten path, but an overwhelming portion of the population is hooked into the same fabric of distribution of information and products. This is made easier, and is also perceived more readily, by a shared home language being the language of interchange.
This isn't progress, this is death by gentrification.
It's utterly sad that the same chain stores, the same shops, the same products are sold coast to coast, that the menus of most restaurants have basically zero variation from Louisiana to Arizona to California to Maine, places that historically could not be more different.
Now you can land in some random city in the US and apart from a few very small pockets that have resisted this overwhelming pressure to conform, they're all the same.
I want to visit an America where I can't understand what they're saying even though it's allegedly English, where you need to work at it, absorb the local dialect. Where they have strange terms for things that you need to learn to fit in. Where there's a sense of being somewhere and having history worth sharing.
You're right! That sounds like an amazing experience, going to a different part of your country and finding a deeply different culture. Where accent and vocabulary and daily life are all different. Where there's a sense of place, and a distinct local identity and history.
It's perhaps possible that you and I are so wonderfully blessed as to already live in such a place!
I've had the experience of struggling to understand the local dialect. To work to absorb the local diction and vocabulary, to come to grips with local history and understand the local identity.
It's easy to see a Taco Bell, a Starbucks, and a cookie-cutter diner and decide every place is the same. To be sure, those very much are. Yet, it's perhaps possible that this is just a patina. What you and I and others seek and love is there, today, still. It lives and breathes and thrives. It just requires a token effort to look for.
There is still a lot of that out there (getting smaller though). For example if you aren't in the American South, don't expect to be able to order sweet tea in a restaurant -- instead, you will get iced tea and some packets of sugar (which isn't the same as putting sugar in when the tea is being made). Only recently have I seen sweet tea offered in some places.
I grew up in the midwest, however my mom is from the deep south. So I didn't realize that most people around here have never had (or heard of) a banana sandwich (made with banana, mayo, and white bread). And until recently, you couldn't get things like headache powder (Goody's, Stanback, BC). That was strictly a Southern thing.
The key is to ignore all of the giant signs and flashy advertising and look for the local brands. They're everywhere, even in Wal-Mart. Just look at the lower shelves.
Of course, this doesn't always work when you're in a place like Minneapolis, or Chicago, or Dallas, where the national brands are the local brands.
The problem is that when Wal-Mart shows up all the local businesses die but for the ones that sell stuff that Wal-Mart doesn't. That's usually just porn and adult toys with the occasional guns and/or liquor store.
Sweet tea is an interesting example actually, in that McDonalds made it available nationally 10 years ago.
There is a certain amount of culinary darwinism at play here, where the strongest regional foods have gone national over the last couple of decades. See also, Chipotle scaling the Mission burrito to thousands of stores.
1. Different parts of the US have vastly different values and cultural differences. Unless of course you want to compare SF, to rural Utah filled with devout Mormons, to the south side of Chicago, to Miami and say they're all the same.
2. The argument you're making is essentially against cosmopolitanism. I don't per say disagree, but it should be known that while you listed off the "fun" parts of a huge diversity of culture in one country you also run into the less fun when it comes to shared values on things like equality of the sexes, permissiveness of different sexual orientations and religions etc. Those very much so are also a huge part of cultural diversity.
There are pockets where there's cultural differences, but you really need to dig to hit the bedrock. Superficially there's almost no difference. The things that once made places like San Francisco unique and interesting are being destroyed by gentrification, and Utah itself is being gentrified just the same.
I'm not arguing against cosmopolitanism, but that's not what you think it is. That's where wildly different cultures can co-exist, side by side, and you can move seamlessly from one to another. Manhattan used to be a good example of this, but now it's getting extremely bland, with all the character being paved over by crushingly dull uniformity.
A lot of Americans think accepting diversity means allowing non-white people to act as if they were white, and this is where all this gentrification comes from. Yes, our condo is progressive because we don't discriminate. Anyone who can afford the cripplingly high costs are welcome to live there!
> I want to visit an America where I can't understand what they're saying even though it's allegedly English, where you need to work at it, absorb the local dialect.
It may be more interesting to visit such an America, but it would be a lot harder to democratically govern such an America.
then your feelings are mis-calibrated. They only have had free elections for 20 years! Aceh is practically a theocracy. Political violence is common. They just jailed under blasphemy laws the loser of of the governor's election in Jakarta.
I bet it would be a different story if you took the direction of movement of the score.
Honestly I was thinking about the presidential politics rather than regional. Indonesia is a large and diverse country. Similar population to the USA and arguably more diverse.
Based on what I know about Indonesian politics and American politics. I grew up in Indonesia for a while during the Soeharto regime, and have maintained an interest since.
> I want to visit an America where I can't understand what they're saying even though it's allegedly English, where you need to work at it, absorb the local dialect. Where they have strange terms for things that you need to learn to fit in.
Try visiting an English-speaking country that's not America. I suggest that because the inverse was true for me:
In 2010, I (Australian) ended up in a hotel somewhere between Mobile, Alabama and Pascagoula, Mississippi on my way to Pascagoula to go sailing for work. First time in America. In the morning, I wanted breakfast, and saw a Waffle House at a truck stop over the highway from the hotel. I knew them from films but I'd never been to one. I wandered in, and tried to order.
The waitress could not understand my accent, and I could not understand hers. I ended up ordering by pointing at the menu. Then I ate waffles with bacon and maple syrup (what a crazy mixture. I've had it since, but that was the first time) while listening to Southern accents around me, only 3/4 of which I could decipher. Let me tell you, hearing Southern accents in movies or TV did not prepare me for a random, back-of-nowhere truck stop outside a small town in Mississippi.
You might be able to get the same experience in a small town out back somewhere in Australia. Who knows. Try it :)
> The waitress could not understand my accent, and I could not understand hers. I ended up ordering by pointing at the menu. Then I ate waffles with bacon and maple syrup (what a crazy mixture. I've had it since, but that was the first time) while listening to Southern accents around me, only 3/4 of which I could decipher. Let me tell you, hearing Southern accents in movies or TV did not prepare me for a random, back-of-nowhere truck stop outside a small town in Mississippi.
As an American in Australia I found that I could communicate easily enough, but it was often a struggle with cashiers. Katoomba was the smallest town I visited, and that didn't pose much of a challenge (except for the food). Contrast that experience with London's east end where there were a number of accents I simply couldn't understand. The thing I've found with Australia, Canada, and the UK is that in major cities the dialect is similar enough that if you're somewhat familiar with British vocabulary you'll be fine. Contrast that to someplace like Indonesia / Malaysia / Singapore where the accent isn't impenetrable but the slang is mostly Malay derived and it's a whole other world.
Bringing it back to Waffle House though, the only WHs I've visited were in areas where the southern accent wasn't particularly strong. We have local and big chain diners out here on the west coast (e.g. Denny's, IHOP), so a diner isn't a new experience. But visiting Waffle House was a bit of a culture shock to me. While I could understand the words, every single person was discussing football. Except for some expat restaurants, you really wouldn't find that style of situation.
I remember ordering a burger in the South once and being asked "Do you want that all the way?" I, being from the Northern Midwest, had no idea what the waitress was asking. It turns out she was asking whether I wanted all the toppings (which in my dialect I would call "with the works") or with no or only a few toppings.
Death of culture. Death of variety. Death of everything that made America an interesting place to visit.
Every city used to have its own local shops, brands, traditions, cultural events. Cleveland and Rochester were worlds apart despite being geographically close.
Now it's the same stores, the same malls, the same cookie-cutter McMansions. The only variety left is the color of the police cars and minor variations in the speed limit.
This isn't progress, this is death by gentrification
I don't know if gentrification is the right word. Maybe death by standardization.
The big breakthrough that made McDonald's a successful company was coming up with processes and supply chains that allowed its food to be predictable.
Before McDonald's, when you drove across the country and stopped at a burger joint, you never knew what the food would be like. Today, if you see the golden arches, you know exactly that the food will look like, taste like, and for the most part, cost.
This is also true on an international level. Even though there are regional items on McDonald's menus, when I buy fries in St. Petersburg, Florida, they taste exactly the same as the ones I get in St. Petersburg, Russia.
There's a name for it in diplomatic circles, but the term escapes me. Essentially, opening McDonald's restaurants in a new country introduces that country to supply chains, language, tastes, and other Western elements that help bridge the cultural gap between nations and brings a level of understanding to the masses that eventually leads to closer relations. It's the reason that when McDonald's first went into Europe, it used the slogan "The taste of America."
With the exception of Russia and Georgia, it's said that no two nations that have McDonald's have ever gone to war.
A lot of people with no understanding of history laughed when it was brought up that opening a McDonald's in North Korea was an important part of the Trump-Kim summit. But diplomats saw it as a watershed moment.
> With the exception of Russia and Georgia, it's said that no two nations that have McDonald's have ever gone to war.
And NATO and Yugoslavia, the US and Panama, Israel and Lebanon, and Russia and Ukraine. One could even argue Qatar and Saudi Arabia at this point.
Of course, it should be noted that the attitude of globalization preventing (major) war from breaking out isn't new--at the beginning of the 20th century, it was a quite common view that Europe was too economically intertwined for war to break out. Instead, three of the bloodiest and most destructive wars in history broke out.
> when I buy fries in St. Petersburg, Florida, they taste exactly the same as the ones I get in St. Petersburg, Russia.
I'm an American currently living in Russia. McDonald's menu here is different. In fact, it's better and the ingredients are higher quality (which is quite ironic). Same for all American fast-food chains in Russia (and Europe, for that matter).
> With the exception of Russia and Georgia, it's said that no two nations that have McDonald's have ever gone to war.
> A lot of people with no understanding of history laughed when it was brought up that opening a McDonald's in North Korea was an important part of the Trump-Kim summit. But diplomats saw it as a watershed moment.
That's the first time I hear that correlation, and it's amazing. I could see that opening a McDonald's in NK would be symbolic, but not at that one-layer-deeper level.
It's the kind of freakonomics insight I'll be able to drop at conversations for a long time!
> With the exception of Russia and Georgia, it's said that no two nations that have McDonald's have ever gone to war.
Well, I went to do a research on that. It's called "The Golden Arches Theory"[1], it was meant to be tone-in-cheek, but to rationalize on the idea that two countries who develop a middle-class and economic stability to make a McDonald's viable no longer have an interest on going into war to each other.
Of course, there are many exceptions, both before, immediately and long after that "theory" was written:
- The 1989 United States invasion of Panama
- In 1999, India and Pakistan fought a war over Kashmir, known as the Kargil War. Both countries had (and continue to have) McDonald's restaurants.
- The 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, following hostilities ongoing since 1973, with South Lebanon occupied until May 2000. (McDonald's franchises were established in Israel and Lebanon in 1993 and 1998, respectively.) However, the Lebanese Armed Forces were not a party to the fighting, the Israel Defense Forces action being taken instead against the paramilitary group Hezbollah.
- The 2008 South Ossetia war between Russia and Georgia.
- The 2014 Crimean crisis between Russia and Ukraine.
And even more amazing, there's an improved version of the theory:[2]
"The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention stipulates: No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell's, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain."
That is that, as long as corporations have major supply chain operations in countries other than that corporation's home country, those countries will never engage in armed conflicts. This is because of the economic interdependence between nations that arises when a large corporation (such as Dell) has supply chain operations in multiple global locations and when developing nations (in which supply chain operations commonly take place) are reluctant to give up their newfound wealth.
But I doubt that updated version wouldn't fall short to prevent the exceptions listed above.
An interesting thing is that despite all that, there is still a huge amount of diversity in the US, along many dimensions, based on what I've read in Wikipedia, for example, about regional US cuisines. The US might be a melting pot, but many of the ingredients in the pot are not quite melted - to coin a phrase :) - and I hope they stay that way.
despite all that, there is still a huge amount of diversity in the US
This is true. The more you travel, the more you encounter this. Chili in Cincinnati is not even remotely the same at chili in Houston. (Key ingredients in Houston are meat, chili powder, and tomato paste. Key ingredients in Cincinnati are chocolate, allspice, cinnamon, spaghetti, and cheddar cheese.)
Breakfast meat in eastern Pennsylvania is scrapple. In New Jersey it's Taylor ham. In Kentucky it's sausage links. In Iowa, it's bacon.
Philadelphia area grocery stores (last time I checked) stock Campbell's Cream of Turtle Soup. That would be unheard of in the rest of the country.
There are a lot of people who sit on the internet and whine about how boring life is in America. Life in America is like most other countries — exactly as boring as you make it, or as exciting as you make it. And again, the more you travel, the more you see the diversity of the nation unfold.
I dunno. This is a topic I'm pretty passionate about. I'm extremely well-traveled within the US and have a lot of good friends from different states, and the tiny regional differences that you're mentioning are frustratingly bland compared to, say, the cultural differences between northern and southern France. And even there, the relentless pace of branded technology and products is increasing, to the point where in historic Aix-en-Provence, in a famously beautiful town square, there's an entire metallic-and-glass Apple store.
It pains me to see the same restaurants, architecture, road signs, vehicles, etc- because they're all slowly becoming the same, when they used to be so different. Houston, where I live, is a desert of strip malls, and the only reason you can tell it's Texas is because it's hot and sunny. Take away the sky and I could be in the same parking lot in any state in the US.
Going to the "historic" neighborhoods of cities or the national/state parks and wilderness areas are really the only way to truly get a feel for the vastness and diversity of the US, and it didn't use to be that way.
>because they're all slowly becoming the same, when they used to be so different.
Welcome to the modern world. This will eventually happen everywhere. It's easy for places to be different when they were separated by days or weeks of travel time. Now ideas can be transferred in seconds and the entire US can be traversed in days. Regional factories used to supply the area around them. Now one part made in China can be supplied anywhere on the planet.
The past was like the past because of logistics. The future is looking much different.
Conversely, technology also allows similar people to refine their ideas about what makes them similar. Cultures will maintain their separate ideas and market strategies as long as there are enough people to pay for them. After all, Walmart is struggling in other markets as varied as China and Canada, because their model doesn't adapt very well outside the US. Likewise, visiting a KFC in China is actually very different from visiting a KFC in the US.
I think many tend to exaggerate the level of regional differences in America. Sure, there are some significant differences, but it's nowhere close to the level of difference of going to another country (except Canada).
For example, language wise, if someone was raised in the US, I probably can't tell at all where they're from, especially if they're younger and/or college educated. Regional accents are weak as hell in the states, on average.
I've lived in several regions in the US and never really got a feeling of being out of place or alien that I get sometimes visiting other countries.
Regional accents are weak as hell in the states, on average.
Then you haven't talked to many real locals when you travel.
When I talk to my relatives in New York City (real native New Yorkers, not imported midwest poser hipsters), my wife from another part of the country can't understand a word we say.
Siri is tuned to some California nuanced accent that means she can't understand my wife at all. I don't know how it understand people from Boston. (Again, real local people from Boston, not the imported flatlanders.)
A friend of mine from a major east coast city went through years of training to get rid of his accent. He says it was the key to becoming a success in the radio industry.
dude, your wife is exaggerating - excluding Gullah I don't think any range of American accents even approaches the mutual unintelligibility on that tiny island we seceded from. I've been from east to west in the US, downeast, new york, boston - these are no problem whatsoever for any Californian or Midwesterner.
It's a baseline. It's common that many places will have local offerings that exceed the baseline (moreso in other categories like beer than potato chips), but it's nice to know that literally the worst possible thing that could happen is they only have Lay's.
Americans used to ridicule people living in the Soviet Union because they had to buy the same sofa, the same car, the same beer, all manufactured by the state. They lived in the same apartments, stamped out by decree, from Europe to the Pacific.
Now having Lay's everywhere is a thing to be celebrated?
Lay's are terrible. It's like what happens to a potato when you take all the fun out of them and make them into something
even blander.
I think they meant that you can find Lay's everywhere, not that you can only find Lay's everywhere. There's a huge difference between those two things. I'd take that any day over Soviet Union.
It's this kind of bland ubiquity that is what the Soviet Union was all about.
I'm not saying the Soviet experience was great, but that the modern American experience of the same shit, the same stores, the same everything everywhere you go is bordering on absurd.
America is a handful of mergers away from having one cable company, one telephone company, one media company, one film production company.
Wow, your description of the US culture is very scary. Like an exaggeratedly dystopian future. We have many problems in Europe, but this senseless uniformization is, by far, not as complete as it seems to be in the U.S.
The uniform experience of the US is why I roll my eyes at people who suggest "why would I travel elsewhere if I haven't even explored my own country?"
As if seeing some new sights is the only rewarding aspect of being somewhere new rather than experiencing something truly different in life, like different culture, language, and way of life.
Although an awful lot of this difference is due to poverty and shouldn't be romanticized. I was recently in Cambodia and the new thing there is that they've recently gotten smartphones. Yes, some of the people I was with bemoaned this fact as it meant that things were becoming "less authentic", but the thing is, due to the lack of computers, the smartphone revolution is also the Internet revolution there. It is an wonderful thing from the Cambodian perspective.
There is no senseless uniformity. It really makes complete sense when you look at it from a logistics prospective. Why have 5 regional factories making things slightly different when you can make one large factory and exploit the efficiencies of scale and the countries transportation networks.
The US has been pretty easy to cross since WWII. It is very easy for goods to travel through states. Europe, as a whole has not, though the formation of the EU has helped.
There's not a lot of shared religion in the US, other than growing secularism. Agnosticism, last I saw, was the fastest growing belief. When Americans were more religious, there was a lot of conflict over that.
> Being able to drop in anywhere in a country of 300+ million people and being able to converse with the locals (not just communicate, but convey your deepest thoughts)--it's a benefit the vast majority of people in the world simply do not have.
Weird how I never really noticed that. The US does have its fair share of local dialects, but they are usually still very easy to understand, even for non-native English speakers. It's one of the reasons why I prefer US English to British English, with some British dialects I have a really hard time understanding what's being said.
Do Brits struggle with understanding some British dialects?
As a native German speaker, I know for a fact that some German dialects just sound like incomprehensible gibberish to me.
Which is extra funny when you run into these kinds of dialects near big US military installations, like Grafenwöhr, where the locals speak with an extremely thick upper palatinate dialect.
Must be really confusing for any of the US servicemembers stationed there who are trying to learn German, trying to understand German that not even most Germans would be able to understand.
I see a lot of non-native English speakers speaking English to each other because it’s a common language they all know. It’s not the same as what you’re describing, but it gets people a lot of the way there (my observation is based largely on Europeans and South Americans but others too, basically anywhere where English is commonly learned)
Glad you asked, as this article reminded me of that. Outside of Northern China, where Mandarin is original dialect, the answer is no, Mandarin is not understood throughout the country on a level that English is in the US.
It's a kind of second language for many, with younger generations generally being more fluent than their elders. Like the Indonesian dialect, it's somewhat forced by recent government mandate except for the North where it's from.
The frequency of overhearing people asking each other for more clarification showed me that language barriers existed, even among university students. English by contrast is much more consistent and far less ambiguous among accents and dialects across the globe.
At first when people complimented me on my English, I didn't really understand why until I realized most Chinese are not fluent in Mandarin in the way I am fluent in English. It seemed they thought the same fluency disparity would exist among US natives with English.
I experienced the same in India a few month ago, when I traveled the length of the west coast with an Indian friend of mine. Coming from the US, I never appreciated how diverse the country is, especially with language. In the south especially, he often struggled just as much as me to communicate with people from his own country, despite being fluent in both Hindi and English.
It blew my mind a little bit, especially realizing the administrative nightmare it must be to run a country of over 1.3 billion people with so many languages.
If you look at any Indian currency bill (Rupee), you'd see the denomination written in words in 22 languages, though in a smaller font. Those are the official languages of India. The official languages of the central government are Hindi and English. All government communications between the central government and state governments or between state governments commonly happen in English because India does not have one language identified as a "national language". Administrative nightmares are avoided by the use of English, which then gets translated to local languages as required. Apart from the 22 official languages, there are nearly a thousand languages/dialects (the distinctions are quite hazy) spoken in the country.
What your Indian friend experienced could be because of an assumption that many people in the north make about Hindi being the lingua franca around the country. The truth is that while Bollywood has made Hindi more widespread than it otherwise would be, every section of the country its non-Hindi languages, be it west, east, north east or the south, resists the imposition of Hindi by governments. People in many states, not just in the south, may not even understand Hindi or speak it even if their languages are closer to Hindi.
Among Indians, only someone from some of the northern states (where Hindi is the official language) would mistakenly think of Hindi as a "national language" or a bridge language.
Can attest to this as someone who has Indian parents but not born in India. You can get further with English than you would with Hindi in some parts.
It seems India’s education has done well for introducing English to the young kids.
You still have huge language barriers. I am impressed by the diversity of the world. m
Most software is still very US centric and that makes me sad at times. English became a standard because the Victorian empire was very good at colonizing and pushing their ideas down other cultures’ throats. Good for them.
But when one learns other languages, you begin to realize how broken and inconsistent English is. If English would be a programming language, it would be PHP.
Every language has its ups and downs. English is broken and inconsistent, but compared to, say, German (which I'm learning now), at least the core grammar is less complicated, it's more flexible, and most importantly there are no noun genders goddamn I hate those so much.
I visited a Hyderabad office that used English with each other, not just with me, because half were locals who knew Telugu and half were recent arrivals who knew Hindi.
I knew 4 languages before I went to school. My parents know 2 additional languages (they grew up in a different state) than me. I can't read, speak or write these languages. So, if I travel to the place where they grew up - I'm a tourist.
The more you try to put India in a box to simplify things, the more complex it gets. Joan Robison, a Cambridge Economist once said "whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true."
> In the south especially, he often struggled just as much as me to communicate with people from his own country, despite being fluent in both Hindi and English.
The languages [1] of the 4 southern states of India are somewhat different from Hindi and other northern, central, western and eastern Indian languages (not too sure about the north-eastern states like Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, etc., though I guess even they have some Sanskrit influence, e.g. even two of those state names are Sanskrit-based - Manipur means jewel city and Meghalaya means abode of clouds - roughly).
I say "somewhat different" because, some of the the southern languages do have some Sanskrit influence and Sanskrit or Sanskrit-derived words, like the other ones do. I think the others are supposed to have much more Sanskrit influence. For example if you understand Sanskrit you can understand a lot of Hindi, and vice versa. (Studied both in school for some years.)
[1] Tamil in Tamil Nadu, Malayalam in Kerala, Telugu [2] in Andhra Pradesh (and now Telengana, which split off from Andhra some years ago), and Kannada in Karnataka are the 4 main southern languages, although there are dialects of them, and probably some other less well-known languages too (Tulu is one - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulu_language ). The amount of variety and diversity on many fronts in India is amazing.
For example, I did not know for a long time that Modi script was an alternative script earlier used to write the Marathi language.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_language - see the part about it being called "the Italian of the East" :) - I used to think that it was because it is lilting or sort of rolls off your tongue, like Italian (guessing), but saw in the article that it is because words end with vowels in both languages.
Think of Mandarin like English. Many regions only have it as second language, with not everyone speaking it well (and just like with English, younger generations do better on average). In regions where it is the first language, it is usually a dialect differing from Standard Mandarin.
Canton (guangzhou) speaks Cantonese, Shanghai speaks Shanghainese, and so it goes, with none of these languages having much at all to do with Mandarin (The Shanghainese use of tones is closer to Scandinavian languages than other Chinese languages!). In Hong Kong, Mandarin would be your third language in school, unused in public except to communicate with visiting mainlanders.
Writing is basically isolated from the spoken language, so there the primary concern is that some areas use traditional Chinese, whereas others use simplified.
Previously most Hong-Kong movies were in Mandarin (under the Shaw Brothers), but since the eighties they switched back to Cantonese. Only the state sponsored, politically correct Peking-film school movies and TV is mandarin, the popular movies are all in Cantonese.
To add to this (as a Hong Kong native):
Hong Kong is definitely a weird, special case, having belonged to Britain until 1997 and basically most people growing up there on some level despise the mainland, communism, and the language. To this day there's a certain level of disdain and judgment against you if you speak Mandarin there, almost like you're branded as "the others".
It's also true that provinces with rich cultures far away from Beijing continue to have their local dialects thrive. This is very true of Guangdong and Sichuan/Chongqing (see Sichuan rap). Yunnan also is quite noted for having many minorities and dialects still being preserved. The same cannot be said for Shanghai, where the younger generation have been eager to adopt to just speaking Mandarin as the mainstream thing to do. I had a girlfriend from Wuhan, and she grew up listening to the dialect there but her parents never encouraged her to converse in it, so she only speaks Mandarin.
My wife is from Shanghai, but spent the later half of her life in Hong Kong, so she speaks Shanghainese, Cantonese, Mandarin, English fluently and now also Danish and Swedish intermediate. As I am Scandinavian, I am mostly just conveying her knowledge and my brief observations, all while she makes me feel horribly inadequate in the language department.
I recall a trip to Shanghai a while back where my wife mentioned that her Shanghainese was rusty, which she felt resulted in her being considered foreign. It would appear to me that people were still preferring Shanghainese, although she did mention that Mandarin words were used at random.
Are you talking about a younger generation yet, or might I have been misunderstanding something (very probable)? I'd ask her myself, but she's in Mainland doing research right now, and The Great Firewall makes communication patchy at best. :/
I've spent 2 years in Shanghai as an exchange student, and I think whether you get the impression that the "younger generation" no longer speaks Shanghainese depends a lot on whether you focus on people born in Shanghai to parents both speaking Shanghainese, or all inhabitants of Shanghai in that age group.
The former are likely to speak at least a little Shanghainese, but limited due to only using it at home and with some of their friends. The latter don't really have a need to learn Shanghainese, because Mandarin is the language used in school and for all kinds of business.
Personally, I only know one native Shanghainese speaker. Because my friends are university students from all over the country, the actual proportions are likely not as extreme, but I still think that Shanghainese speakers are a minority by now.
Similar to my wife, she's from Shantou and speaks her local dialect Teochew (pretty much used by everyone in her hometown), Mandarin and also Cantonese fluently.
According to her though, everyone in her city speaks the local dialect, and they only speak Mandarin if needed.
That isn't true. Many people will speak their local dialect as a native language, even outside of cantonese speaking areas. My wife is from a town in Hunan, her mandarin is native, but that's because her mom and dad were from different places in Hunan. But there are still many kids in that area who speak Mandarin with a heavy accent...
Cantonese isn't very special as Chinese dialects go; e.g. Taiwanese/Fujianese (Min Chinese) are just as proud of their dialect (more so in Taiwan where the push for mandarin is not as strong as on the mainland).
I disagree, but I'd like to add that just like everywhere else in the world, the younger generations have a higher average level of education and linguistic skill, thus being better at both second and third languages than the previous generations.
Mandarin words are also adopted in local languages to fill gaps by the younger generations, just like English words are often put to use in the west. Not as fully incorporated loan-words, but just as a Mandarin word randomly injected into a foreign language sentence (Those speaking Cantonese use English words instead).
However, the native tongue of the younger generations is not Mandarin, at least not in any of the areas I have knowledge of.
Source: Married to a native Shanghainese (who is in the 20-30 range) who spend half her life in Hong Kong, and thus spoke Cantonese, Shanghainese, Mandarin and English fluently out of necessity (more western languages have been added to the list later on).
Depends on the area. You'll find speakers of lots of foreign languages all over in NYC or coastal California.
What might be unusual in the US though is that it's a big country in both population and geographic size, and yet the amount of regional variation in the primary tongue is quite limited. I think the UK and Germany have considerably more variation, even though they're smaller countries.
Yes, but it exists alongside other dialects spoken locally which are sort of mutually intelligible, but in some cases only when written (cf. Cantonese).
It's analogous to large parts of the US outside the Northeast Corridor using various dialects of American Sign Language, which is written the exact same as American English, but only among people from their home city, and also having varying degrees of command over spoken English.
> American Sign Language, which is written the exact same as American English
ASL is an utterly different language from English. Your sentence is equivalent to saying that because a person speaks Cantonese but writes English, Cantonese is the same as English.
"English can be represented through fingerspelling or artificial systems like Signed Exact English or Cued Speech. But these are codes for spoken or written language, not languages themselves." from http://mentalfloss.com/article/13107/7-things-you-should-kno...
It is a common misconception, because English speaking people are generally taught Signed Exact English and see it used for real time translation, but that has no grammatical crossover with ASL.
Oliver Sacks wrote a fabulous book on the subject: Seeing Voices.
Well, isn't it a wonder more than a billion people can understand each other's writings even if they speak different dialects. To some extent, a Chinese and a Japanese can communicate with Hanzi/Kanji even if they don't understand the other language.
I've been in the middle of Sichuan (in Tibetan counties), many of the older people don't understand mandarin while the younger people do. The same applies to rural Xinjiang.
Definitely Mandarin will get you farther in China than English, but it isn't quite universal yet.
It makes sense that the language is too young to have evolved to be a means of communication.
I remember being surprised that the phenomenon of colonial rulers of a country imposing their own language on the population (occurred with the British wherever they went) was not true for Indonesia. The Dutch seemed to have kept their language out of reach for most of the local population. There being no translation for a lot of words, especially legal terms, from Dutch to local languages, a lot of Dutch words ended up being part of Bahasa Indonesia. This could be more cause for it to feel like a foreign language.
It's always seemed wild to me that Indonesia doesn't come up more in general in the west. It seems like the only time I hear about it in the news is when there's a natural disaster.
Indonesia is poor, far away, not particularly significant geopolitically, and there's no large Indonesian diaspora in the West outside of the Netherlands. A large portion of Indonesian-Americans are actually ethnically Chinese.
It's a huge country in terms of both population and land, and with abundant natural resources including oil. It's the largest Muslim nation in the world, and also has significant numbers of religious minorities. It's adjacent to many other eastern and southeastern Asian markets. There's definitely interest to be had there.
Largest Muslim-majority nation. However, they are on a frightening trajectory towards becoming a Muslim nation. Their democracy is on increasingly thinning ice.
Islamisation of Indonesian politics has happened and faded away before, in the early 2000s. The current wave is worrisome, but there is no reason to believe it will rise indefinitely.
It is democracy and free speech that is enabling Islamic politics in Indonesia. The alternative is a strongman who imposes secularism. Indonesia already tried that, it is not so good for minorities.
Indonesia doesn't have free speech. Look what happened to Ahok. The FPI, who wants to institute sharia law, managed to get him jailed for two years on a BS blasphemy charge. Where is the "atheism" option for the KTP?
I'm afraid the concept of separation of Church and state in the Indonesian constitution and principles is not nearly strong enough. It's trying to have the cake and eat it too. I don't believe the legal constructs and government checks are strong enough to resist what's coming.
Indonesia does seem to have more than its fair share of natural calamities, but anyone who looks at a map cannot help but wonder at how much the country is spread across latitudes and longitudes, while not being extremely large in terms of land area (compared to say, the five largest countries in the world by land area). Such a country having one language as the lingua franca is a big deal, despite the difficulties and inconsistencies pointed out in this article.
This article is hyperbolic and opinionated at best, and ignorant at worst. A vast majority of the country speaks Bahasa Indonesia as either a first or second language. You have to go to very remote villages to find people who don’t speak it.
The author’s idea that Indonesians have other “options” of languages to speak if they don’t like Bahasa Indonesia is also laughable. People will generally know their own particular ethnic language, and may choose to speak it when they are only around others who speak it too, in the home for instance. But people rarely elect to learn a second local language that they didn’t grow up speaking.
Bahasa Indonesia is used very widely, partly because the opportunity to use local languages is quite restricted, especially in cities, where the populations are much more diverse. Regions tend to have their own localised slang, but I think that’s true everywhere in the world.
I've never liked that witticism. For one thing it breaks down really quickly - ie by that logic Welsh is a dialect of English, and Walloon French is a dialect of Flemish. It's also fairly irrelevant to me what a government thinks is a dialect when I want to discuss languages. IE ethnic chinese can call languages that are mutually unintelligable 'dialects' all they want, it doesn't change reality.
The Yiddish original, "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot", was targeted at people who refused to view Yiddish as an independent language, but rather just as a dialect of German. The point was that if Yiddish-speakers had their own country, those people wouldn't have said that.
People use it like it's a rule, but it was more a specific quip about Yiddish, and how many saw it as a dialect of German, rather than a distinct language.
Sort of somewhat tangentially related, I've been watching a lot of Indian youtube recipe videos recently and was a bit surprised by the amount of English phrases being spoken. I know there's a lot of people who know English in India but it felt like a lot of videos the presenters/chefs would switch seamelessly from what I assume is Hindi to an English sentance and then back again.
It felt like around 20-30% of what was said was English, the rest I assume Hindi, but I guess what really surprised me was that it wasn't one or the other, but a mixture of both.
Due to the long presence of British in India and its influence, English words have seeped into common usage across all Indian languages (except Sanskrit, which is not practically used by a substantial number of people for general conversation and communication). You'd find sentences in most languages constructed with some English words that have become common over time. The reasons for this are many, including the fact that English is considered as a language of the higher classes in society and as the one that provides better opportunities in life. What's also interesting, or surprising, is that the accents and pronunciation of the English words also change with the ___location and the influences of the local language.
In many states in India, and more so in the south, you'd find many people who're able to converse in at least two to four languages, including English.
India has so many different languages that's it's simply a necessity to repeat the most important parts said in English.
Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil are only the most important ones, but their are hundreds of them.
To unify such a huge market you mix in english phrases to get the general meaning across.
> Sort of somewhat tangentially related, I've been watching a lot of Indian youtube recipe videos recently and was a bit surprised by the amount of English phrases being spoken.
It is called "Code-switching" which is a common theme amongst multi-linguals.
There are more Javanese speakers in the world than Java programmers. Please look at the other graphs that I made if you're interested in internationalisation!
The only really successful state-demanded language simplification was in Korea, with Hangul. Wonder how that happened, but Korean really is extremely simple and successful.
New Greek is also successful, but this grew out naturally such as English out of modernized Nieder-German. These had nothing to do with dialect unification efforts, only natural modernizations.
The neighboring Filipino and Tagalog (it's popular natural dialect) are also extremely simple, such as english or korean, a simple mixture of Malay and Spanish. The Filipino effort is comparable to the standardization effort in Indonesia, but was much more successful. Even if English is their standard language in government now.
So in summary, a modernized language is a necessity, but only if it grew naturally and is not too revolutionary. People tend to simplify their language anyway, regardless of books, news or TV.
Almost everyone speaks the standard Filipino anywhere in Philippines because it is taught as a basic subject alongside English. However, Filipino is not the majority's first language here but the grammatical structure is the same most of time so it is easy to learn.
But today, Filipino as its own language is diminishing its own identity due to its flexibility to combine and replace using English words. As an example, you will rarely hear the Filipino word for sorry today, because "sorry" has been integrated closely in conversational dialogues as a word replacement because it is simple to say and short to write.
I hear "sorry" somewhat frequently in Munich now from Germans, I think because there isn't a simple direct equivalent in German; "Entschuldigung" is more like "excuse me" and "es tut mir leid" sounds kind of...stiff or overdone. At least that's what it seems like to me.
Anyone interested in conlangs would do well to study Malay. It is not a constructed language per se, but modern standard Malay (Bahasa baku) underwent a massively interesting standardization phase in the 60s which resulted in a fairly consistent language today.
By contrast the standardization of Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia baku) looks comical. The rules of Indonesian are all over the place.
Unfortunately in Malaysia, modern spoken and indeed modern written Malay has gone the same way Indonesian has gone - textspeak and internet lingo made all the standardization efforts in vain. But from an intellectual point of view, standardized Malay has very nice consistent properties to it - it's a lot harder on rules than English.
For example in English there are no rules on nounification of verbs. In Malay, you simply wrap the lemma of the verb between "per...an" - so speak "kata"(meaning speak) becomes "perkataan" (meaning words). There are clearly also rules regarding spelling - "cegah" (deter) becomes "pencegahan" (deterrence) instead of "percegahan", but by and large the standards are sane and doesn't have very many exceptions, or have exceptions that can actually be encoded by rules (unlike English where it's I before E except before C, except that's not true at all).
And the best part about the standardization is that it doesn't shun the heritage of the language. There are a lot of Australasian aboriginal linguistic features that made the cut and got improved in my opinion.
Take for example, the linguistic feature that is repeated across many Australasian aboriginal languages: repeating a word to indicate a higher count.
"Laki" as a root word means "man". "Laki laki" means... "men". The standardization process that happened in the 50s formalized a rule that had been in the language earlier - "Lelaki" means "men". Interestingly here's a Indonesian grammar blog that discusses this: https://www.katabaku.com/2016/05/laki-laki-atau-lelaki-yang-... (TL;DR - "lelaki" is "true" while "laki-laki" is canonical form)
In Malaysia, the word "laki-laki" is no longer being used. Instead the language and community converged upon using the word "lelaki", which is a more succint and elegant way of using it.
TL;DR - Malay went through a very nice standardization process while Indonesian went through in my opinion, a not-as-well-thought-of standardization process.
"laki" actually an example of a word that changes its meaning when reduplicated instead of creating a plural. "laki" means husband and "laki-laki" means man or male. So you have to be careful about using for producing plurals. Generally Indonesians prefer to denote number contextually e.g. by saying "one apple" or "many apple".
"laki" means man in Malay, but is a synonym for "suami" (husband) in Indon. I assume "lelaki" slipped into Indon lingo after a while (if you read old Malay books, before the 1960s, the word "laki-laki" is used a lot more than "lelaki") - I have no experience with written Indonesian stuff
As somebody learning Bahasa Malaysia (or Bahasa Melayu, or whatever it is now), do you have any references on this, particularly the standardisation part of Bahasa Baku? For example, I'd always assumed "lelaki" just meant "male", which probably means saying "dia lelaki" is a little bit off ;) (and is probably why I shouldn't pick up BM from street signs...)
Dewan Bahasa Dan Pustaka. They have an awesome library in KL. I once spent a day in there when I was far younger than I am today. Ask for their reference section for the language.
Do note that modern BM doesn't have very many markers for plurality.
"Dia lelaki" is off mainly because it translates to "he male". "Seorang lelaki telah ..." translates to "one men already..." which is semantically equivalent to "one man already".
Claims about the relative simplicity or complexity of different languages are rarely grounded in actual linguistic evidence. Languages comprise so many parts that it's not even clear what the basis of comparison could be: is English, a language with highly restricted word order but without grammatical case marked on most nouns, more complex than Russian, a language with comparatively free word order but a highly articulated case system? Who can say?
With that in mind, the statements about Bahasa Indonesian being simpler or more rigid than other languages are more like social or cultural judgments than bonafide linguistic facts.
I'm not even convinced the basic argument that a language with 40-odd million people regarding it as their primary language is not widely spoken is true (never mind the ludicrously false clickbaity "no-one speaks" headline). Sure, more Indonesians speak other languages at home and with fellow native speakers because they're the local languages of particular areas, some of which were more widely spoken than the Malay dialect Bahasa Indonesian was based on in the first place, or else closely identified with their ethnic and cultural backgrounds. And the fact that Bahasa Indonesia is the main language of domestic politics and education (and largely irrelevant outside Indonesia) means that people who speak the languages of their ancestors are bound to view speaking it instead of their local dialect as stuffy and formal regardless of its linguistic characteristics (see also: other multilingual countries) and bound to create slang versions that incorporate their local words which aren't particularly intelligible to foreigners schooled in the classroom version.
And I don't think even English, usually the sole language spoken by native speakers and definitely not lacking in standard phrases and vocabulary, would pass the author's litmus test of "do native speakers in different regions of England all speak it in everyday conversation in a manner so close to the textbooks a foreigner can easily understand it"
Visit Newcastle, Liverpool or Glasgow and I think a lot of people basing their English comprehension on the ‘BBC’ accent will not have an easy time, I agree.
True, I am fairly fluent in English, but when I moved to Liverpool I was lost and even ordering some basic stuff was often challenge. Even now when I get back I need some time to get used to their accent.
While I agree with you in general, a surprising number of grammatical features that make many other languages difficult to learn are missing in Indonesian. Some examples:
No grammatical gender
No plural forms of nouns
No grammatical case
No verb conjugations
No verb tenses
In addition, written Indonesian uses the Latin alphabet and has a very consistent phonemic orthography.
Of course, it also has some more complicated features, like formal and informal pronouns. But it still seems fair to me to say that it is grammatically simpler than many (most?) other spoken languages.
I don't think that is fair to say. There are lots of other languages that lack most/all of these features (e.g. Mandarin has no gender, limited number marking, no case marking, lack of inflections). Indonesian is not unique in that regard.
Indonesian verbs lack the tense, number and person agreement marking that is commonly found in European languages, but they have a lot of derivational morphology including complex voice and valency operations (Austronesian alignment[0], causatives, applicatives etc.)
Indonesian also has noun classifiers like Mandarin which have to be memorised like grammatical genders.
Yup, typically what a native Indonesian would say about how easy their language is. But foreigners are often tripped with other aspects of the grammar, which the native take for granted, such as those tikwidd mentions: noun classifiers, morphological derivation, a high number of prefixes/suffixes/infixes and their combination, lack of cue on how to pronounce the different "e" vowels, etc.
I don't quite understand your comment in relation with the article. The main subject isn't the complexity or simplicity of the language but rather that it's not effectively used by the population at large which makes it a relatively inefficient tool for communication. He mentions that the language "has fewer words than most languages" but that's not his main point.
This text is also clearly not meant as a treatise of linguistics about Bahasa Indonesia, it's more of a cultural trivia piece so I don't think it's really fair to criticize the lack of cold hard linguistic facts. It's also an important piece of information for anybody considering learning the language, as it turns out that it might not be as useful as one might guess even if you plan to live in Indonesia.
I do challenge your assertion that "claims about the relative simplicity or complexity of different languages are rarely grounded in actual linguistic evidence". It's true that it's very hard to judge the "absolute" difficulty of a language because everybody has very profound cultural and linguistic biases. It's also true that it's not generally a very useful information, I don't know which of Italian or Vietnamese is objectively harder but I know that as a speaker of French and English I'd probably have an easier time learning the former than the latter.
That being said I think if you're familiar enough with the languages you're "rating" you can come up with a pretty decent classification of "absolute" difficulty. For instance I'd personally consider Portuguese to be objectively harder than Spanish, because while they're extremely similar languages Portuguese does have an objectively more complex phonology and slightly trickier grammar. I would also say that French is "absolutely" more difficult than Italian because of the more complex spelling and phonology.
Chinese is widely considered a difficult language, partly because it's tonal (and you could say that's cultural bias) but also because of its very complex writing system. I don't think anybody could say that the differences in difficulty between written Spanish and written Chinese can only be attributed to cultural judgement.
> For instance I'd PERSONALLY consider Portuguese to be OBJECTIVELY harder than Spanish.
Emphasis mine.
I don't mean to say that some languages aren't more difficult for speakers of a particular language to learn--no doubt French is easier for English speakers to learn than Chinese. A speaker of a different language that is also tonal would likely find Chinese easier to learn, though. What you're really measuring is not complexity but similarity.
You have a good point that some languages may have more difficult writing systems than others. Linguists traditionally don't consider orthography to be part of a language proper, as a language can have multiple writing systems (like Serbo-Croatian) or none at all, but you're right that most people don't make that fine a distinction between language and writing system.
I didn't mean to be overly critical of the article, which I mostly enjoyed, but saying that a language is "simple" or "rigid" carries a lot of cultural and political baggage--think about how Europeans of the colonial period denigrated African languages, or how in the United States, Australia and Canada indigenous children were punished for using their own language.
No-one disputes that some writing systems are more complex than others, but statements like an "objectively more complex phonology" or "slightly trickier grammar" are pretty difficult to cash out in precise terms.
We know that kids learn all of these languages at the same pace, which suggests that the complexity differences between spoken languages are not particularly significant from the point of view of someone who doesn't already speak a language.
Some languages are objectively easier than others, at least in part.
Latin languages like Italian, Spanish and French have literally dozens of conjugations[0] where English usually handles all tenses and quantity with "will, would, did, had, -ed" plus a handful of irregular verbs, which themselves have two words to learn each (unlike Italian irregular verbs [1])
Spanish and Italian are only easier to read and write since their spelling is regular for the most part.
>Latin languages like Italian, Spanish and French have literally dozens of conjugations[0] where English usually handles all tenses and quantity with "will, would, did, had, -ed" plus a handful of irregular verbs, which themselves have two words to learn each (unlike Italian irregular verbs [1])
That's just one point of comparison, though. You can also identify features of English which appear to be more complex. For example, English has phrasal verbs, two forms of the possessive, VP ellipsis and antecedent contained deletion, a greater number of nominalization constructions, a greater number of ECM constructions, etc. etc. No-one has come up with any sensible measure of complexity according to which any of these languages is clearly more complex than another.
>Spanish and Italian are only easier to read and write since their spelling is regular for the most part.
No-one claims that all writing systems are equally simple. Indeed, some are easier to learn than others.
By the way, how should one measure language difficulty objectively? I think one proxy can be: the number of years a non-native learner typically requires before reaching a certain level.
A couple years ago I read a book about learning languages, by a guy who'd learned 30 languages to some degree and was fluent in seven. In his opinion, Indonesian was the easiest to learn by far. He gave various reasons, but what sticks in my mind is that to make any noun plural, you just say it twice.
(But I've also read that simple languages tend to develop a lot of extra nuances that native speakers use to add expressiveness, so there's a larger gap between just being able to communicate, and sounding like a native speaker.)
> Claims about the relative simplicity or complexity of different languages are rarely grounded in actual linguistic evidence.
I don't think that's justified in the case of Bahasa Indonesia, or indeed any language which is more widely used as a second language than as a first. And it's pretty much a dialect of Malay, which also has a long history as a second language used for trade.
Would a polyglot with a linguistics background be someone with enough credentials to make comparisons though? I agree though that it's hard to have a baseline or even quantify simplicity/complexity in languages.
I think it's more about it being a second language. People usually don't have too many difficulties with their mother tongue. The problem comes, as this article implies, when people try to learn a second, especially when they're not experienced in language learning. This is the case here because they're trying to get many different groups to move to a standardised language. A simpler grammar makes a lot of difference in cases like these.
I don't know what counts as bonafide linguistic facts but when I studied Indonesian I was struck by how much more regular and simpler it was than English. For example:
