Nuts and Bolts: Indonesian.

We've had a couple of comments sent to The Word Den recently - well not comments, exactly, more advertisements for gambling sites, but hey - which have popped up on some rather old posts. 

They were written in the Indonesian language.

Well, I didn't even know there was an Indonesian language (many thanks to Google translate for enlightening me). So from where has this Indonesian language come?

Well, yeah, yeah, it comes from Indonesia, obviously. But Indonesia is a large country (fourth largest in population in the world, getting on for a quarter of a billion people) and has many languages (perhaps three hundred), so which of these languages counts as Indonesian?

Indonesian is, basically, the Austronesian language previously known as called Malay, and the history of how it got to be called Indonesian is interesting and unexpected.

The colonial language of Indonesia, Dutch, would normally have become well-established in the Indonesian islands, but it was never spoken by very many of the inhabitants and disappeared very swiftly after independence.

This was partly because Indonesia was keen to forge an identity among its nation of 17,500 islands, but it was quite as much because of the way the Dutch had administered the country. The Dutch did not attempt to use their language as a lingua franca, but instead had a policy of discouraging native Indonesian people from learning the language, even though many official forms had to be completed in Dutch. The idea was to maintain a distinction between the social status of the Dutch and that of the ruled. This policy continued until the 1930s.

During the 1930s there was some agitation for the adoption of an official native language to be called Indonesian, but before anything was done about it Indonesia was invaded by the Japanese, which led to the complete banning of the Dutch language. Three years later, when the Japanese had left, Indonesian was announced as an official language of all the 17,500 islands.

Indonesian, as I've said, is basically Malay. Malay wasn't the most spoken language in the islands (that was Javan, and after that Sundanese: three times more people spoke Sundanese as Malay) but Malay was the most widely spoken language, and the language of trade and travel. Javan, on the other hand, was the language of politics and literature and religion - and if you're trying to unite a large and disparate new country then the last thing anyone wanted to do was to remind people about politics and religion. In any case, Malay had been used all over the place for a thousand years and most people knew it a bit.

Nowadays almost everyone in Indonesia speaks at least two languages, a local language and Indonesian, which is now the language of education and government. Indonesian is still the second language of most Indonesian people, but it's perhaps the most important thing which makes them feel Indonesian. 

And so (I hope very much) they will all live happily together for the rest of their lives.

Word To Use Today: Indonesian. This word comes from the Greek place name Indos and the Greek word nesos, island, so Indonesia means the Indian islands. The name was coined in the 1700s, not by Indonesians. Still, after independence the name Indonesia was preferred to Maleische Archipel, Malay Archipelago, or Netherlandsch Oost Indie, which had been used by the Dutch.