Indonesian

What the Malay base consists of

Standard Indonesian descends from the Classical Malay of the Riau-Lingga Sultanate in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a court language despite being called Riau Malay. Malay has served as a lingua franca in the archipelago for half a millennium, and its ancestor Old Malay goes back to the 7th century and the Kedukan Bukit inscription of Srivijaya. Whether the court form or the bazaar Malay of the ports is the true parent is still debated.

Why Dutch lost to it

The nationalist movement rejected Dutch from the start. Indonesian was allowed in Volksraad sessions from July 1938, the year the First Indonesian Language Congress met in Surakarta to call for a new grammar and spelling. When Japan conquered the colony in 1942 it banned Dutch and required Indonesian for official business, and three years later the new republic made bahasa Indonesia its national language. The 1945 constitution fixes that status in Chapter XV, and Government Regulation No. 24/2009 spells it out.

Which coinages from the war stuck

The Komisi Bahasa, set up on 20 October 1942, is said to have coined more than 7,000 terms. Most failed. Jantera, from Sanskrit, briefly displaced mesin for machine, and kilang stood in for pabrik, factory, before the Dutch-derived words came back. A few lasted: pajak replaced belasting for tax, and senam replaced gimnastik. Journalists did not wait for the commission and coined terms themselves, a habit that continues.

How it drifted from Malaysian Malay

Indonesian and Malaysian Malay share a basis but differ in pronunciation and in technical and administrative vocabulary, mainly through Dutch and Javanese loans. Javanese also gave bisa, can, which in older Malay meant only venom. Malaysians tend to see the two as varieties of one language; Indonesians tend to treat them as separate, and feel less need to harmonise. The 1972 spelling reform was seen mainly as a Dutch-based spelling giving way to Malaysia's English-based one.