Jakarta - Bahasa Indonesia now has a total of 91,000 official general words, an increase of 13,000 in just five years, the Ministry of National Education said on Monday.
The head of the ministry’s Indonesian Language Center, Dendy Sugono, said the center has launched an effort to encourage students to preserve their mother tongue amid the increasing use of the Internet and other forms of communications technology.
The “Love Bahasa Indonesia Campaign” was recently launched in the university town of Bandung, the capital of West Java Province. A team from the center has also been handing out stickers displaying some of the new additions to the Indonesian vocabulary at the Cihampelas Walk shopping mall in Jakarta.
The new words include unduh , or download; pos-el , or e-mail; daring , or online; luring , or offline; lama n , or homepage; pinda i , or scan; and acang , or gadget.
Indonesian, like other languages, adopts words from foreign and local languages.
“If we can’t find the direct translation in Indonesian, we can adopt the word, although sometimes we have to refine the pronunciation or the spelling,” Dendy said, adding that most of the words adopted from local dialects had the same vowel and consonant structure as Bahasa Indonesia.
Data provided by the Language Center indicated that Indonesia has 473 different languages, 206 of which are spoken in the provinces of Papua and West Papua.
Dendy said that since 1978, 405,000 words relating to a full range of subjects had been officially adopted, many from English and other major European languages. “Some words, like ‘orbit’ and ‘semester,’ were even adopted directly as there was no difference in their spelling and pronunciation,” Dendy said, adding that other words, such as “video” and “radio,” were adopted with the same spelling but with different pronunciations.
He said that other words that originated from European languages, including French, Italian or German, were adopted first from their English equivalents. However, if the words had no English equivalents, they were adopted directly from the original language and refined according to Indonesian spelling and pronunciation rules.
Many new words used in Islamic studies originated from Arabic and were adopted using the Arabic-Latin transliteration guide issued by the Ministry of Religious Affairs, Dendy said.
The Indonesian Language Center has also developed special dictionaries for chemistry, biology, physics and mathematics, according to Dendy. “We adopted the words from their language of origin into Bahasa Indonesia after consulting with experts from each subject,” he said.
M. Umar Muslim, a Bahasa Indonesia lecturer at the University of Indonesia, warned that some of the newly adopted words may never be used in daily conversation.
“They may not sound right to an Indonesian’s ears,” Umar said, adding that the adoption of foreign words into Bahasa Indonesia cannot be done indiscriminately. He said that the use of English words in daily conversation is unavoidable because it is the most widely-used language in the world.
Source: http://www.thejakartaglobe.com (January 20, 2008)
The head of the ministry’s Indonesian Language Center, Dendy Sugono, said the center has launched an effort to encourage students to preserve their mother tongue amid the increasing use of the Internet and other forms of communications technology.
The “Love Bahasa Indonesia Campaign” was recently launched in the university town of Bandung, the capital of West Java Province. A team from the center has also been handing out stickers displaying some of the new additions to the Indonesian vocabulary at the Cihampelas Walk shopping mall in Jakarta.
The new words include unduh , or download; pos-el , or e-mail; daring , or online; luring , or offline; lama n , or homepage; pinda i , or scan; and acang , or gadget.
Indonesian, like other languages, adopts words from foreign and local languages.
“If we can’t find the direct translation in Indonesian, we can adopt the word, although sometimes we have to refine the pronunciation or the spelling,” Dendy said, adding that most of the words adopted from local dialects had the same vowel and consonant structure as Bahasa Indonesia.
Data provided by the Language Center indicated that Indonesia has 473 different languages, 206 of which are spoken in the provinces of Papua and West Papua.
Dendy said that since 1978, 405,000 words relating to a full range of subjects had been officially adopted, many from English and other major European languages. “Some words, like ‘orbit’ and ‘semester,’ were even adopted directly as there was no difference in their spelling and pronunciation,” Dendy said, adding that other words, such as “video” and “radio,” were adopted with the same spelling but with different pronunciations.
He said that other words that originated from European languages, including French, Italian or German, were adopted first from their English equivalents. However, if the words had no English equivalents, they were adopted directly from the original language and refined according to Indonesian spelling and pronunciation rules.
Many new words used in Islamic studies originated from Arabic and were adopted using the Arabic-Latin transliteration guide issued by the Ministry of Religious Affairs, Dendy said.
The Indonesian Language Center has also developed special dictionaries for chemistry, biology, physics and mathematics, according to Dendy. “We adopted the words from their language of origin into Bahasa Indonesia after consulting with experts from each subject,” he said.
M. Umar Muslim, a Bahasa Indonesia lecturer at the University of Indonesia, warned that some of the newly adopted words may never be used in daily conversation.
“They may not sound right to an Indonesian’s ears,” Umar said, adding that the adoption of foreign words into Bahasa Indonesia cannot be done indiscriminately. He said that the use of English words in daily conversation is unavoidable because it is the most widely-used language in the world.
Source: http://www.thejakartaglobe.com (January 20, 2008)
