Do You Speak Bahasa?
Dear Diary,
Perhaps one of the things that I don’t understand about English language in relation to my own country and culture is the colloquial use of the word ‘Bahasa’ to refer to the Indonesian/Malay language. This may only be confined to Singapore/Malaysia as I haven’t really checked other sources yet…
Strictly speaking, the word ‘Bahasa’ means language. The phrase ‘Bahasa Indonesia’ is the one that refers to the Indonesian language.
So when someone asks “Do you speak Bahasa?” my mind automatically translates the word Bahasa and comprehends the sentence as “Do you speak Language?” which doesn’t make much sense.
Why not ask “Do you speak Language?” and “Do you speak wen?” to ask an English- and Chinese-speaker respectively?
Is this because saying the word ‘Indonesian’ is too hard for some?
The correct sentence would be either “Do you speak Indonesian?”, the more-complete “Do you speak Indonesian language?”, or the semi-localised “Do you speak Bahasa Indonesia?”.
Just some random thought of the day…
Bisa ngomong Bahasa Indonesia*,
bcc
*: Can speak Indonesian
October 31st, 2004 at 7:40 am
…in javanese we use,
“punapa panjenengan saged bebasan?”
=
apakah anda bisa berbahasa?
to ask whether someone can speak javanese or not. So maybe Sing-lish is absorb javanese grammar for this case.
October 31st, 2004 at 7:41 pm
The query is not localised to Singapore/Malaysia. I too have been asked if I “spoke Bahasa” by a local Aussie who had one year of Indonesian in high school. The first thing I said to them was their question didn’t make sense.
October 31st, 2004 at 9:25 pm
Haha I must admit that I have committed this error before, made especially worse when considering my heritage. (=
And actually I believe the more-complete version should be “Do you speak *the* Indonesian language?”.
Anyway eh, as a suggestion perhaps you can enable text formatting tags on your comments.
October 31st, 2004 at 9:52 pm
Hmm interesting… I’ve been wondering why all my HTML formatting in comments are stripped out. Then I checked the blog’s Preferences, and found that there’s this thing called ‘Allow HTML in Comments’. So HTML is now allowed! Yay!
Silly me…
November 1st, 2004 at 4:56 am
In the netherlands, people also ask that kind of question.