Indonesian: what sets it apart, and how long it takes

A country of seven hundred languages picked a trade tongue nobody owned rather than the majority language, and it worked.

FamilyAustronesian › Indonesian

ScriptLatin

Speakers200M 44M native · 156M second

Weeks to a working level36 Thirty-six weeks, the same as German, which shares thousands of words with English. Counted from English. It is the Foreign Service Institute's figure for someone starting from English and from nothing.

The first hundred words cover49.1% and the first thousand 77.1%

What sets it apart

Javanese had far more speakers, but Malay was chosen in 1928 precisely because it belonged to no dominant group. It has been holding the country together ever since.
Verbs do not conjugate. No tense, no person, no number.
Plural is often made by saying the word twice: buku book, buku-buku books.
No grammatical gender, and one word for he and she.
The grammar is famously light, so the work is almost entirely vocabulary, which is why it takes as long as German overall.

What it opens

The easiest entry into Asia: Latin alphabet, no tones, no conjugation, plurals by saying the word twice. The fourth most populous country speaks it, and it was designed to be shared. Seventeen thousand islands, the world's largest youth market, and Bali as your study-abroad excuse: the easiest big language on Earth.

Words with no translation

jayus

JA-yoos

A joke told so badly that the failure itself becomes funny

A word for a very specific rescue: the laugh arrives anyway, just not where the teller aimed it.
Indonesian slang, and one of the few words on this page that is genuinely useful at parties.

All the untranslatable words →

Next to its neighbours

Where Indonesian parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.

Indonesian vs Malay → Indonesian vs Tagalog →

Where to practise it

Reading about a language is not speaking it. These are the places I would go to find someone to speak Indonesian with.

The Indonesian Passepartout is not out yet

Five printed pages that carry you through the arrival. Leave your address and you hear about it first, and nothing else.

Leaving takes one click.

Stories in Indonesian

Short stories written inside a measured vocabulary, with the word lists and nothing invented for a textbook.

Indonesian in the archive, next to the other sixty-six →