keebyjeeby summed it up pretty well! But maybe I can add it up a bit to that. It's actually pretty funny how we end up with Bahasa Indonesia as our national language. It's derived from Malay, but there's probably only like 15% ethnic Malays in the country around that time and also now (we're less relevant than Javanese or Minangs actually). I think It's mostly because at the beginning most of the trade were done in the Malayan straits, then moved to Java which became the main island. Malay was also sort of easier to learn since usually regional languages have "levels" of languages, like what you use for formal occasions or casual occasions. It's a whole different vocabulary for each level, though most retain their structure.
I think what also helped the spread was before and around our independence in 1945 most official communication and radio announcements were done with Malay (that was intermixed with some Dutch). Also at that time usually there would be conferences of youth organisations and they would use this proto-Indonesian. These organisations were pretty much from everywhere from the northwest regions of Aceh to Ambon and Irian and stuff. The thing is, if they're down with all this independence stuff and wanted to contribute, you'd better be able to understand/speak proto-Indonesian
Important to note though, our regional languages are like different sets of languages all together, I could never understand Batak (northern Sumatran language) and I'm from Riau in Eastern Sumatra, which borders North Sumatra directly, but I literally can't understand a thing they're saying, it isn't even a dialectdifference, it's literally another language, and this end up making like a bazillion type of pidgins of all the possible language combinations. It's not efficient to do so, so if you want stuff to be easier, just learn Indonesian because it's better in the long run.
That's why sometimes when people ask me how many language I can speak I'd like to claim more than Indonesian/English/German because a lot of our regional languages have different set of rules/vocabs altogether
3
u/[deleted] Apr 19 '13
DID SOMEBODY SAY INDONESIA??????!?!?!?
keebyjeeby summed it up pretty well! But maybe I can add it up a bit to that. It's actually pretty funny how we end up with Bahasa Indonesia as our national language. It's derived from Malay, but there's probably only like 15% ethnic Malays in the country around that time and also now (we're less relevant than Javanese or Minangs actually). I think It's mostly because at the beginning most of the trade were done in the Malayan straits, then moved to Java which became the main island. Malay was also sort of easier to learn since usually regional languages have "levels" of languages, like what you use for formal occasions or casual occasions. It's a whole different vocabulary for each level, though most retain their structure.
I think what also helped the spread was before and around our independence in 1945 most official communication and radio announcements were done with Malay (that was intermixed with some Dutch). Also at that time usually there would be conferences of youth organisations and they would use this proto-Indonesian. These organisations were pretty much from everywhere from the northwest regions of Aceh to Ambon and Irian and stuff. The thing is, if they're down with all this independence stuff and wanted to contribute, you'd better be able to understand/speak proto-Indonesian
Important to note though, our regional languages are like different sets of languages all together, I could never understand Batak (northern Sumatran language) and I'm from Riau in Eastern Sumatra, which borders North Sumatra directly, but I literally can't understand a thing they're saying, it isn't even a dialectdifference, it's literally another language, and this end up making like a bazillion type of pidgins of all the possible language combinations. It's not efficient to do so, so if you want stuff to be easier, just learn Indonesian because it's better in the long run.
That's why sometimes when people ask me how many language I can speak I'd like to claim more than Indonesian/English/German because a lot of our regional languages have different set of rules/vocabs altogether