Indonesia Deliberately Chose a National Language That Wasn't Its Biggest One

Indonesia has more than 270 million people and something on the order of seven hundred living languages. When it became independent, it needed one that everybody would use.

The obvious candidate was Javanese. It had by far the most native speakers — tens of millions, concentrated on the most populous island, home to the political and cultural centre of the new country.

They did not choose Javanese. They chose Malay, a trade language spoken natively by a much smaller share of the population, and made it Bahasa Indonesia.

That decision is one of the more interesting acts of deliberate nation-building in the twentieth century, and it is the reason the language is now unusually easy to learn.

Why Pick the Smaller One

Two reasons, and both were sound.

Politics. Making the majority group's language the national language would have made every other group a subordinate. In an archipelago of hundreds of ethnic groups being assembled into a single state, that is a permanent grievance built into the foundations. Choosing Malay meant almost everybody was learning a second language — which put nearly the whole country on equal footing, including the Javanese.

Structure. Javanese has an elaborate system of speech levels, in which the words you use depend on the relative social status of the person you are addressing. It is expressive and it is genuinely difficult, and it encodes hierarchy into every sentence. Malay, honed for centuries as a trade lingua franca across the region, had been simplified by exactly the pressure you would want: generations of non-native speakers using it to do business with each other.

The commitment was made publicly in 1928, at a youth congress that declared one homeland, one nation, one language — years before independence was achieved. It was an aspiration first and a policy afterward, and it worked.

What Trade-Language Ancestry Does to Grammar

A language that spends centuries being used mostly between people who did not grow up speaking it loses the features that are hard to acquire. Indonesian is the result, and for an English speaker the list of absent difficulties is remarkable.

No verb conjugation. The verb does not change for person, number, or tense. Makan is eat, and it is also eats, ate, eating, and will eat. Time is indicated with separate words — already, not yet, tomorrow — the way you would say it anyway.

No grammatical gender. No masculine or feminine nouns, no agreement to memorise. The third-person pronoun does not even distinguish he from she.

No tones. Unlike Mandarin, Thai, or Vietnamese, pitch does not change meaning. You can say a word wrong and still say the word.

No new alphabet. The Latin script, spelled close to phonetically. Five clean vowels. You can read a sign correctly on day one, which is not true of Japanese, Thai, Arabic, or Russian.

No plurals in the way you expect. Context usually handles it, and when you do want to be explicit, you repeat the word. One person is orang. People are orang-orang. This is called reduplication and it is used all over the language, frequently with a pleasing logic — it is hard to be intimidated by a grammar rule that amounts to saying it twice.

The Feature Worth Learning For

The single best thing in Indonesian is a word with no clean English equivalent: belum.

English has yes and no. Indonesian has yes, no, and not yet.

Are you married? — not yet. Have you eaten? — not yet. Have you been to Bali? — not yet.

The word does real work. It converts a negative answer into a statement about a trajectory, and it removes the finality that "no" carries. It is also socially graceful in a way that is characteristic of the language generally, and once you have it you will want it in English.

That is the kind of thing you only get from learning a language rather than reading about one — the discovery that a distinction you assumed was fundamental is a choice your own language happened to make.

What Is Actually Hard

Honesty requires the other column.

Affixes. The absence of conjugation is compensated by a system of prefixes and suffixes that change a root word's function — turning it into a verb, a noun, a causative, a passive. This is the genuine learning curve, and it is the point where beginners who thought the language was free run into work.

Formal versus everyday speech. What is taught in textbooks and what people say in Jakarta differ substantially. Colloquial Indonesian drops affixes, borrows heavily from regional languages, and uses different pronouns. You will understand the news and be lost in a conversation between friends.

Regional reality. Most Indonesians speak Indonesian as a second language, after Javanese or Sundanese or one of hundreds of others. Outside cities you will meet people more comfortable in something else entirely.

None of that is unusual. It is considerably less than the entry cost of most languages worth learning.

The Payoff

Indonesian is regularly ranked among the easiest languages for English speakers, and unlike most easy languages it is not spoken by a small population. It gets you the fourth most populous country in the world, and it is close enough to Malaysian that it substantially travels.

The other thing worth knowing is the reception. Indonesians are famously, disarmingly encouraging toward anyone attempting their language, including badly. A greeting and a thank you get a warmth that is out of all proportion to the effort.

Which makes it an unusually forgiving place to be a beginner — and being a beginner is the part that stops most people.

Fun With Indonesian: A Cheerful Guide to Speaking Bahasa Indonesia teaches it the way you will actually use it — pronunciation, the words that open doors, eating your way through the vocabulary, getting around, and making friends.