Languages in Indonesia

Indonesia is a big country with many islands. Each island has its own traditional language. Based on a government survey, Indonesia has 1158 traditional languages. Can you imagine how chaotic (chaotic is an adjective, chaos is a noun) Indonesia would be if we didn't have a national language? Our national language is Bahasa Indonesia. Since Indonesia became an independent nation, government education has taught Bahasa Indonesia. But if you come to Indonesia you can still find people who can't use Bahasa Indonesia, or they prefer to use their traditional language.

In Indonesia, besides the traditional language, we have another language. In daily life, we don't use proper Indonesian language, we use Indonesian casual language or Bahasa Gaul. Bahasa Gaul is a kind of language that uses a lot of slang words. Usually, people in the age group from 12-30 years old love to use Bahasa Gaul, especially teenagers. Bahasa Gaul can sound quite different from the proper Indonesian language. For example: "Did he kiss you?" in proper Indonesian language is "Kamu dicium dia?" and in Bahasa Gaul is "Lu dicipok doi?". It's totally different, isn't it?

People usually have some common abbreviations used in chatting and this is also true in Indonesia. If you are texting in Indonesian language for the first time, you may not be able to understand. Basically, if we are texting in Indonesia we remove some vowels or consonants from the word. For example: "Have you taken dinner?" In Bahasa Indonesia is "Apa kamu sudah makan?", while in indonesian texting slang it is "Ap kmu udh mkn?"