Indonesian phrasebook
Indonesian (Indonesian: Bahasa Indonesia) is the official language and lingua franca of Indonesia, and also widely spoken in East Timor. With over 230 million speakers, there are a lot of people to talk to in Indonesian.
Indonesian is closely related to Malay, but the main difference is the vocabulary: Indonesian has been heavily influenced by Dutch and Javanese (and also Sanskrit), while Malay has been heavily influenced by English and Arabic.
Grammar
Indonesian word order is subject-verb-object like English. There are no plurals, grammatical gender, or verb conjugation for person, number or tense, all of which are expressed with adverbs or tense indicators: saya makan, "I eat" (now), saya sudah makan, "I eat already" = "I ate".
A characteristic of Indonesian is that it is a so-called agglutinative language, which means that the suffixes are all attached to a base root. So a word can become very long. For example there is a base word hasil which means "result". But it can be extended as far as ketidakberhasilannya, which means his/her failure.
Pronunciation guide
Indonesian is very easy to pronounce: it has one of the most phonetic writing systems in the world, with only a small number of simple consonants and relatively few vowel sounds. One peculiarity of the spelling is the lack for a separate sign to denote the schwa. It is written as an 'e', which can sometimes be confusing.
In Indonesia, spelling reforms in 1947 and 1972 have officially eliminated several vestiges of Dutch in the otherwise very phonetic spelling, and the writing system is now nearly identical to Malay. However, the older forms remain in use to some extent (especially in names) and have been noted in parenthesis below.
Stress usually falls on the second-to-last syllable, so in two-syllable words the first syllable is stressed.
Vowels
- a
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This page was last edited at 11:35, on 16 December 2008 by Jani Patokallio. Based on work by Nick Roux and Valtteri Päivinen, Wikitravel user(s) Maryrennt, Meursault2004, Episteme and Mnd, Anonymous user(s) of Wikitravel and others.
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