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Comment by curtis | Hacker News Reader

The article's premise is that it seems like nobody in Indonesia speaks Bahasa Indonesia well, because it's always a second language. I can't find a good reference right now, but I think that's wrong. I'm under the impression that in Jakarta and the surrounding areas (probably tens of millions of people) Bahasa Indonesia really is spoken as a first language. I think this area has historically been Malay-speaking anyway, and modern Indonesian is very closely related to Malay, so this wouldn't be a big stretch.

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I'm Indonesian. Lots of people have Bahasa Indonesia as their first language, especially in the cities. Unless you go to the remote areas, you practically won't find people who can't speak Indonesian.

In fact, it's the use of regional languages like Sundanese which is diminishing. I could really feel the skill and the vocabulary range of even the native Sundanese are worse than 10-20 years ago. Lots of mixing with Indonesian vocabulary without knowing the Sundanese words.

I think the author's perspective is skewed because he's living in Yogya, which is, and has been for a long time, the center of a large and prestigious culture. Yogyakartans don't need to speak Indonesian unless they're dealing with the government.

It's very different if your native language is only spoken by a small number of people and / or isn't very prestigious.

Then there is, like you said, the capital, Jakarta, where non-Indonesian languages are only spoken at home (or not at all).

And I know for a fact there are is at least one region - but there's probably more - where the local language has pretty much died out. Minahasans, from Northen Sulawesi, no longer speak Minahasan languages, they speak Indonesian.

In Jakarta the people speak Bahasa and Javanese equally. People who have come in from other areas of the country speak their own language plus Bahasa; the Javanese who were born there make Javanese the most common language.

Malay and Bahasa are 90% the same language. Bahasa is considered a traders' language, much like Swahili - a lingua franca that allowed commerce to happen for centuries.

Source: studied bahasa for two years and used to live on Java - amazing, complex place.

I wouldn't quite say "equally". Jakarta is a melting pot and the most significant portion of the population there is of Javanese descent. But many many people who are of Javanese descent don't even speak Javanese, especially if they were born in Jakarta or in the western part of Java.

It seems likely to me that people who are speaking Indonesian as a first language (e.g. Jakartans) have a substantially larger vocabulary than those that are speaking it as a second language (e.g. Yogyakartans). I would presume so, but that makes me wonder what the source of that larger vocabulary -- Malay? Javanese? English? Other languages native to the Indonesian archipelago? All of the above?

> It seems likely to me that people who are speaking Indonesian as a first language (e.g. Jakartans) have a substantially larger vocabulary than those that are speaking it as a second language (e.g. Yogyakartans).

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.

> I'm under the impression that in Jakarta and the surrounding areas (probably tens of millions of people) Bahasa Indonesia really is spoken as a first language.

No, they speak daily Indonesian. If an Indonesian spoke formal Indonesian it would be comparable to an English-speaker speaking lawyerese (imagine someone sounding like a EULA).

Indeed about 20% of Indonesians speak mostly Indonesian at home.

source: 2010 census http://sp2010.bps.go.id/files/ebook/kewarganegaraan%20pendud...

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