Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

They are speaking Indonesian as a second native language, they will acquire Javanese and Indonesian at the same time but use Javanese in conversation and Indonesian when consuming TV, books and in school. So their grasp of formal Indonesian is going to depend mostly on education level.

As for colloquial Indonesian, due to the internet new colloquialisms spread much more rapidly to other parts of Indonesia. So it probably depends on how old said Yogyakartan is.

Is that supposed to be an argument against it? Have you examined the arguments and evidence, which thousands of experts have examined and been convinced by? What exactly do you object to?

What your Indian friend experienced could be because of an assumption that many people in the north make about Hindi being the lingua franca around the country. The truth is that while Bollywood has made Hindi more widespread than it otherwise would be, every section of the country its non-Hindi languages, be it west, east, north east or the south, resists the imposition of Hindi by governments. People in many states, not just in the south, may not even understand Hindi or speak it even if their languages are closer to Hindi.

Among Indians, only someone from some of the northern states (where Hindi is the official language) would mistakenly think of Hindi as a "national language" or a bridge language.

The languages [1] of the 4 southern states of India are somewhat different from Hindi and other northern, central, western and eastern Indian languages (not too sure about the north-eastern states like Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, etc., though I guess even they have some Sanskrit influence, e.g. even two of those state names are Sanskrit-based - Manipur means jewel city and Meghalaya means abode of clouds - roughly).

I say "somewhat different" because, some of the the southern languages do have some Sanskrit influence and Sanskrit or Sanskrit-derived words, like the other ones do. I think the others are supposed to have much more Sanskrit influence. For example if you understand Sanskrit you can understand a lot of Hindi, and vice versa. (Studied both in school for some years.)

[1] Tamil in Tamil Nadu, Malayalam in Kerala, Telugu [2] in Andhra Pradesh (and now Telengana, which split off from Andhra some years ago), and Kannada in Karnataka are the 4 main southern languages, although there are dialects of them, and probably some other less well-known languages too (Tulu is one - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulu_language ). The amount of variety and diversity on many fronts in India is amazing.

For example, I did not know for a long time that Modi script was an alternative script earlier used to write the Marathi language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modi_script

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_language - see the part about it being called "the Italian of the East" :) - I used to think that it was because it is lilting or sort of rolls off your tongue, like Italian (guessing), but saw in the article that it is because words end with vowels in both languages.

The more you try to put India in a box to simplify things, the more complex it gets. Joan Robison, a Cambridge Economist once said "whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true."

Cantonese isn't very special as Chinese dialects go; e.g. Taiwanese/Fujianese (Min Chinese) are just as proud of their dialect (more so in Taiwan where the push for mandarin is not as strong as on the mainland).

Mandarin words are also adopted in local languages to fill gaps by the younger generations, just like English words are often put to use in the west. Not as fully incorporated loan-words, but just as a Mandarin word randomly injected into a foreign language sentence (Those speaking Cantonese use English words instead).

However, the native tongue of the younger generations is not Mandarin, at least not in any of the areas I have knowledge of.

Source: Married to a native Shanghainese (who is in the 20-30 range) who spend half her life in Hong Kong, and thus spoke Cantonese, Shanghainese, Mandarin and English fluently out of necessity (more western languages have been added to the list later on).

I recall a trip to Shanghai a while back where my wife mentioned that her Shanghainese was rusty, which she felt resulted in her being considered foreign. It would appear to me that people were still preferring Shanghainese, although she did mention that Mandarin words were used at random.

Are you talking about a younger generation yet, or might I have been misunderstanding something (very probable)? I'd ask her myself, but she's in Mainland doing research right now, and The Great Firewall makes communication patchy at best. :/

Now having Lay's everywhere is a thing to be celebrated?

Lay's are terrible. It's like what happens to a potato when you take all the fun out of them and make them into something even blander.

Of course, this doesn't always work when you're in a place like Minneapolis, or Chicago, or Dallas, where the national brands are the local brands.

There is a certain amount of culinary darwinism at play here, where the strongest regional foods have gone national over the last couple of decades. See also, Chipotle scaling the Mission burrito to thousands of stores.

> A lot of people with no understanding of history laughed when it was brought up that opening a McDonald's in North Korea was an important part of the Trump-Kim summit. But diplomats saw it as a watershed moment.

That's the first time I hear that correlation, and it's amazing. I could see that opening a McDonald's in NK would be symbolic, but not at that one-layer-deeper level. It's the kind of freakonomics insight I'll be able to drop at conversations for a long time!

I'm an American currently living in Russia. McDonald's menu here is different. In fact, it's better and the ingredients are higher quality (which is quite ironic). Same for all American fast-food chains in Russia (and Europe, for that matter).

And NATO and Yugoslavia, the US and Panama, Israel and Lebanon, and Russia and Ukraine. One could even argue Qatar and Saudi Arabia at this point.

Of course, it should be noted that the attitude of globalization preventing (major) war from breaking out isn't new--at the beginning of the 20th century, it was a quite common view that Europe was too economically intertwined for war to break out. Instead, three of the bloodiest and most destructive wars in history broke out.

Well, I went to do a research on that. It's called "The Golden Arches Theory"[1], it was meant to be tone-in-cheek, but to rationalize on the idea that two countries who develop a middle-class and economic stability to make a McDonald's viable no longer have an interest on going into war to each other.

Of course, there are many exceptions, both before, immediately and long after that "theory" was written:

- The 1989 United States invasion of Panama

- In 1999, India and Pakistan fought a war over Kashmir, known as the Kargil War. Both countries had (and continue to have) McDonald's restaurants.

- The 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, following hostilities ongoing since 1973, with South Lebanon occupied until May 2000. (McDonald's franchises were established in Israel and Lebanon in 1993 and 1998, respectively.) However, the Lebanese Armed Forces were not a party to the fighting, the Israel Defense Forces action being taken instead against the paramilitary group Hezbollah.

- The 2008 South Ossetia war between Russia and Georgia.

- The 2014 Crimean crisis between Russia and Ukraine.

And even more amazing, there's an improved version of the theory:[2]

"The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention stipulates: No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell's, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain."

That is that, as long as corporations have major supply chain operations in countries other than that corporation's home country, those countries will never engage in armed conflicts. This is because of the economic interdependence between nations that arises when a large corporation (such as Dell) has supply chain operations in multiple global locations and when developing nations (in which supply chain operations commonly take place) are reluctant to give up their newfound wealth.

But I doubt that updated version wouldn't fall short to prevent the exceptions listed above.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Olive_Tree#G...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat#Dell_theory_...

Every city used to have its own local shops, brands, traditions, cultural events. Cleveland and Rochester were worlds apart despite being geographically close.

Now it's the same stores, the same malls, the same cookie-cutter McMansions. The only variety left is the color of the police cars and minor variations in the speed limit.

As an American in Australia I found that I could communicate easily enough, but it was often a struggle with cashiers. Katoomba was the smallest town I visited, and that didn't pose much of a challenge (except for the food). Contrast that experience with London's east end where there were a number of accents I simply couldn't understand. The thing I've found with Australia, Canada, and the UK is that in major cities the dialect is similar enough that if you're somewhat familiar with British vocabulary you'll be fine. Contrast that to someplace like Indonesia / Malaysia / Singapore where the accent isn't impenetrable but the slang is mostly Malay derived and it's a whole other world.

Bringing it back to Waffle House though, the only WHs I've visited were in areas where the southern accent wasn't particularly strong. We have local and big chain diners out here on the west coast (e.g. Denny's, IHOP), so a diner isn't a new experience. But visiting Waffle House was a bit of a culture shock to me. While I could understand the words, every single person was discussing football. Except for some expat restaurants, you really wouldn't find that style of situation.

I'm not arguing against cosmopolitanism, but that's not what you think it is. That's where wildly different cultures can co-exist, side by side, and you can move seamlessly from one to another. Manhattan used to be a good example of this, but now it's getting extremely bland, with all the character being paved over by crushingly dull uniformity.

A lot of Americans think accepting diversity means allowing non-white people to act as if they were white, and this is where all this gentrification comes from. Yes, our condo is progressive because we don't discriminate. Anyone who can afford the cripplingly high costs are welcome to live there!

Then you haven't talked to many real locals when you travel.

When I talk to my relatives in New York City (real native New Yorkers, not imported midwest poser hipsters), my wife from another part of the country can't understand a word we say.

Siri is tuned to some California nuanced accent that means she can't understand my wife at all. I don't know how it understand people from Boston. (Again, real local people from Boston, not the imported flatlanders.)

A friend of mine from a major east coast city went through years of training to get rid of his accent. He says it was the key to becoming a success in the radio industry.

It pains me to see the same restaurants, architecture, road signs, vehicles, etc- because they're all slowly becoming the same, when they used to be so different. Houston, where I live, is a desert of strip malls, and the only reason you can tell it's Texas is because it's hot and sunny. Take away the sky and I could be in the same parking lot in any state in the US.

Going to the "historic" neighborhoods of cities or the national/state parks and wilderness areas are really the only way to truly get a feel for the vastness and diversity of the US, and it didn't use to be that way.