Learning Indonesian

We hear lots about Indonesia on our nightly news - but how much do you really know about the people, the culture, or the language of Indonesia?

About 250 million people live in Indonesia, an archipelago of about 13,000 islands just to Australia`s north west - about 6000 of those islands are actually inhabited. There are approximately 400 different languages in use in Indonesia, some of which are dialects (which appear similar), while others are languages in their own right (which are not mutually understood).

Bahasa Indonesia is the common language, which was chosen in 1928, and introduced officially at independence in 1945, and it is used for official things: education, government, business, Indonesia-wide communication, or communication between Indonesian people from different areas.

Bahasa Indonesia comes from the Malay language, and at the time it was chosen as the main language because it had already spread throughout the archipelago as a trading language, originating in East Sumatra. Javanese - the language with the greatest number of speakers - was not considered to be suitable for an egalitarian modern society because of all the different levels of language for different levels of society. Choosing any other language over another would have also elevated that particular group.

When it comes to script, Indonesian is now written in the roman script, like English. It used to have Dutch spelling, e.g. `u` sound written `oe` and `ch` sound written `tj`, but in 1972 was unified and simplified with Malaysian.

Indonesian is taught in plenty of schools across Queensland - in fact it`s a priority language in all States across Australia. It`s also taught at university, although Indonesian studies at university level are suffering, with fewer students enrolling to take it up - however Indonesian has useful applications in business, international politics, peace and conflict studies, journalism and international law.

But students aren`t staying away because of the difficulty of the language - at least initially! "Spoken language for the first stages is easy, and that`s why it`s great - because you can start communicating straight away," comments teacher Shannon Johnston, adding that there`s no need to worry about grammatical constructs like tenses and verb/subject agreement.

However, it does get harder. "In its formal form, and in advanced levels, I think it`s very different for us as English speakers, so that makes it more difficult. It has an extensive system of prefixes and suffixes which make sense at one level, but are culturally very different at another," Shannon says.

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