Loan words in Bahasa Indonesia

Mr. Setiono's interesting and sensible article Loanwords: Imperialism or modernization? in The Jakarta Post on Oct. 16, 1999 led me to think that two very important donor languages to Bahasa Indonesia, those of Portuguese and Dutch, were overlooked.

Portuguese has provided Bahasa Indonesia with a considerable vocabulary of household words, for example: meja (table), sepatu (shoes) and mentega (butter) and not surprisingly many words relating to boats such as: bendera (flag), bordu (gunwhale) and tenda (tarpaulin/tent).

While Dutch has provided many technical words (and they sound like it), principally relating to engineering and cars like dongkrak (car jack), knalpot (muffler), busi (spark plug) and administrative words like kantor (office), formulir (form) and gubernur (governor). Many other administrative words like polisi, immigrasi (basically all words ending in asi) are Dutch but derived from French. This often causes people to think that they are English words, which in turn have derived from French. Some Indonesian words like gang (alleyway) have even stranger origins. Originally a Dutch word exported to Indonesia, it actually derives from Old Norse or High German for path.

Turning back to the article I fear the examples cited as being English are all most likely of Dutch origin too, rather than English, as explained above. The Dutch were in Indonesia for a long time; a lot longer than oil companies and TV advertising have been. Indonesia must never overlook that one of the greatest vectors for introduction of foreign words and phrases into Bahasa Indonesia was Bung Karno, Indonesia's first president. His national day speeches are to this day legendary for their quotes from every European language.

Not surprisingly, the greatest donor language to Bahasa Indonesia over the past 30 years is almost certainly Javanese. This is no bad thing, as they are a significant part of the population. Indicative of this is the increase in thickness of dictionaries over the past 30 years.

With all its loan words, Bahasa Indonesia today has become one of the most vital and diverse languages in the world. In this respect it is similar to English, the origins of which are also multitude.

Hidup Bahasa Indonesia! (Long live Bahasa Indonesia!)

T.C. SCOTT

Jakarta