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The complex story of a simple language

During college I spent a summer in Indonesia, and naturally I picked up a bit of the language. When I say “the language,” I’m referring to Indonesian or, as it is known in Indonesian, Bahasa Indonesia (“language of Indonesia”). This statement is not as obvious as it may sound; Indonesia is home to hundreds of languages, and of these, Indonesian is not spoken as a first language by the majority of the population. But it is the lingua franca, so it’s useful for citizens and travelers alike. I found Indonesian to be straightforward and easy to learn, free of most of the irregularities and annoyances of the Romance languages.

What I understood at the time was that Indonesian is, for the most part, the same language as Malay (Bahasa Melayu), the national language of neighboring Malaysia. I assumed that there were some differences, but that the main one was simply the name. I had no idea at that time of how either version of the language came into existence. It turns out that there’s a bit of a modern myth about the language’s origin—but the truth is even more interesting.

Artificial Intelligence

While doing some research on an unrelated topic, I stumbled upon a webpage claiming that Indonesian was an artificial language. I’d never heard that before and it piqued my interest, so I dug further. A few minutes of web searches turned up quotes such as the following (identities omitted to protect the guilty):

Bahasa Indonesia is an artificial language made official in 1928. By artificial I mean it was designed by academics rather than evolving naturally as most common languages have.

…Indonesian [is] a very simple Malay-based artificial language, designed by academics, and was the official language for a multiethnic country of over 230 million inhabitants.

…Indonesian is a constructed language made by a Dutch missionary in the 1920s on the basis of synthesizing some local languages.

…[Indonesian] was devised by a Dutch linguist, based on various Malayan and Indonesian varieties…in the 1920s.

The language in Malaysia, Bahasa Malay, is a constructed language, and was designed to be easy to learn, as the various people in Malaysia and Indonesia who were told to form rather large nations after WWII needed a common language.

…every language is artificial—it just depends how many people create it. Bahasa Indonesia is also invented but by a group.

Bahasa Indonesia is essentially a constructed language designed to fool foreigners into thinking Indonesia is a monoculture.

…the other major semi-artificial language of recent times, Bahasa Indonesia, the national language of Indonesia, is a syncretic amalgamation of existing Malay dialects that were still in current use.

Even though it is basically the Malay language, [Indonesian] has in common with Esperanto…the fact of having underwent [sic] a kind of planned restructuration to simplify grammar and reduce exceptions.

With all that evidence, I was nearly convinced, though I wasn’t entirely certain what I was convinced of. This string of claims sounded a bit like the telephone game, where a message changes just a bit with each retelling. Then a little voice in the back of my head whispered, “Primary sources, Grasshopper.” Every fact on the web appears to be equally authoritative, but just because somebody says something with conviction doesn’t mean it’s true. So I went to an actual library (two of them, in fact) and looked at ancient documents known as “books”—some more than fifty years old—to see if I could get to the bottom of this story. After all, if a Dutch linguist (or missionary) did in fact invent the language, I should be able to find that person’s name. And if a committee of academics invented it, I should be able to find some record of that momentous project.

Let me cut to the chase: as with all myths, this one has a kernel of truth to it. But the claim that Indonesian is an “artificial” or “constructed” language is simply false.

This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is Island

Indonesia is an archipelago consisting of over 18,000 islands, of which about a third are inhabited. That these islands—and their greatly varying cultures and languages—should be considered a single nation is a relatively recent (and, ethnographically speaking, artificial) notion. Nevertheless, for centuries, traders sailing from one island to another have needed to communicate with each other. Malay was the local language of Malacca, a port town near the southern tip of the Malaysian peninsula. According to legend, local fisherman in Malacca developed Malay as a synthesis of several nearby languages in the late 16th century. However, written records of Malay date back as far as the 7th century, so it is more likely that the fisherman simply integrated new words into the language. (Such borrowing happens in virtually all languages, and the newly incorporated words are known as “loan words.”) In any event, Malacca was a hot spot for traders, and by the time the Dutch colonized Indonesia (then known as the Dutch East Indies) in the 17th century, Malay had already come into widespread use as the regional trade language.

During their more than three centuries of occupation, the Dutch, unsurprisingly, attempted to enforce the use of their own language for trade. In the process, Malay—as spoken in Dutch territory—picked up a number of Dutch loan words, while the Malaysian speakers of Malay developed a somewhat different vocabulary. Meanwhile, due to the influence of Islam, which had been introduced in Indonesia as far back as the 13th century, Malay also picked up a number of Arabic loan words. Because parts of Indonesia were Hindu, Sanskrit also gave numerous words to Indonesian—including “bahasa” (“language”). And since Portugal traded in Indonesia and for many years controlled East Timor, many Portuguese words also found their way into the language. In short: without question, the Indonesian variety of Malay did indeed borrow heavily from numerous other languages, but this was a natural linguistic evolution. However, there’s still more to the story.

The Language of Change

By the 1920s, public sentiment in Indonesia was turning strongly toward gaining independence from the Netherlands. In October 1928, the Sumpah Pemuda (Pledge of the Youth) proclaimed that in Indonesia, Malay was to be called “Bahasa Indonesia” and considered the national language. However, there being no nation as yet, this was more of a rallying cry than anything else. In 1945, Indonesia declared its independence from the Netherlands and stated in its constitution that Bahasa Indonesia was its official language—though it took four years of fighting before the Dutch acknowledged Indonesia’s right to self-rule. So depending on how you look at it, Indonesian became the official language in 1928, 1945, or 1949—though at that time, only a tiny percentage of the nation’s population spoke Indonesian as a first language.

Following independence, the people of Indonesia rapidly abandoned Dutch (to the extent that they had grudgingly adopted it) and began to embrace their new official tongue. It is now the first language of more than 40 million people, and a second language for over 150 million. Although these numbers are still small given Indonesia’s total population of more than 260 million, they represent astonishingly rapid growth for the language.

In 1972, the governments of Indonesia and Malaysia collaborated on a project to reform and simplify spelling for both versions of the language; this consisted largely of eliminating Dutch spellings in favor of more phonetic Malaysian spellings. Malay and Indonesian have about an 80% overlap in vocabulary and are mutually intelligible; the variations in vocabulary, pronunciation, and usage have been compared to the difference between American English and British English. Where Indonesian retains many Dutch loan words, Malay typically replaces these with words based on English.

I like Indonesian a great deal; it has such an elegant structure that it’s tempting to believe it could only have been made artificially. But in fact it’s as natural as the next language, notwithstanding its exceptional capacity for absorbing foreign vocabulary—and contributing to linguistic mythology.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on September 17, 2004.

Image credit: Laura Pro [CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia Commons

Today, January 9, is an important national holiday—it’s my birthday, which I share with such varied figures as Dave Matthews, J.K. Simmons, Kate Middleton, and Richard Nixon. It’s also National Word Nerd Day, which I find quite appropriate, in that I certainly consider myself a word nerd. Back in elementary school, my classmates used to tease me by accusing me of reading the dictionary for fun, but I didn’t understand what was supposed to be problematic about that. Of course I read the dictionary for fun! I love learning new words, discovering the origins of words and how they evolve, and exploring the way language works. That might have had a little something to do with why I studied linguistics in grad school, and why I became an author (and later, a publisher). Yep, I love words, and if you do too, add a few new ones to your vocabulary today. I can also recommend a book you might enjoy: Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by former Merriam-Webster lexicographer Kory Stamper.

Image credit: Pixabay

Losing ground

As a California resident, I have experienced my fair share of earthquakes. They’re unsettling (literally and figuratively), and yet they’re something we have all come to accept as a normal occurrence in this part of the world. We like the climate, the views, the culture—in other words, the whole vibe of the area—and we simply accept that it has its…faults. We stockpile emergency supplies, buy earthquake insurance, perform seismic retrofitting on our buildings to reduce the risk of damage, and then go on with our lives. Each time a truly devastating earthquake hits—such as the great San Francisco quake in 1906 or the Loma Prieta quake in 1989—we learn some important new lessons, and soon thereafter feel much safer about the future.

Sometimes that safety is illusory. For example, on December 11, 1995, the ground moved in a very small area of San Francisco’s Seacliff neighborhood, swallowing Howard Billman’s $1.5 million house (which, back in those days, would have been considered a very expensive property—a mansion, in fact). In this case, however, the cause was not an earthquake, but a giant sinkhole measuring 200 feet (60m) across and 40 feet (12m) deep. Sometimes sinkholes are natural occurrences; in this case, however, the culprit was an old sewer tunnel that had deteriorated. The tunnel itself, of course, was much smaller than the resulting hole. That bit of surprising geometry is just one of the things I find interesting about sinkholes. The mechanisms by which they form, and the abruptness with which they appear—often without warning, and in seemingly unlikely areas—make them even more fascinating, in a rather grim way.

Feeling Depressed and Empty?

Generally speaking, a sinkhole is a depression in the ground formed when the top layer of earth collapses into an empty space below—a process also called subsidence. (If there were no empty spaces—only layers of earth, rock, sand, and water—the ground would remain solid.) The natural question is where those cavities came from in the first place, and the usual answer is that they were always there—unnoticed until the ceiling of stone above them gave way. So what causes a layer of stone to collapse?

Sinkholes are most often found in areas where the bedrock is limestone or another relatively porous stone. Water can dissolve limestone—especially if the water is slightly acidic (due to natural or artificial causes). If acidic groundwater seeps through small cracks in a layer of limestone and into an empty cavity beneath, it can carry away the dissolved rock; the cracks eventually become wide enough that the entire layer weakens and caves in. This type of process is responsible for many of the sinkholes found in Florida and Texas.

Throwing Out the Basement with the Bathwater

But sinkholes can occur for other reasons too. In some cases, the loss of groundwater (due to pumping for municipal water supplies, say) creates new cavities large enough and near enough to the surface that sinkholes result, even though the soil or rock above the cavity was not compromised. Even more interesting, though, is the way damaged sewer pipes or other tunnels, such as the one in Seacliff, create massive underground cavities. In a typical scenario, an old sewer pipe fills to capacity after a rain storm, and due to a blockage or collapse, begins leaking excess water into the surrounding soil. When the water begins to recede, it drains back into the sewer pipe, but now saturated with minerals that have eroded from the adjacent areas. Repeat this process often enough, or with a large enough volume of water, and the empty spaces formed where the soil has eroded away become large enough to turn into sinkholes.

Yet another cause of sinkholes is salt mining—though not always for the reason you might think. Abandoned salt mine shafts can and do collapse, but some sinkholes have a more indirect cause. In Cheshire, England in the late 1800s, salt was produced in great quantities by drying brine that was pumped out of the ground. This brine was a saturated salt solution that had formed by the contact of groundwater with layers of rock salt over many years. Because the solution was saturated, it could not cause further erosion of the salt, and therefore left in place naturally occurring salt pillars that supported the earth above. However, salt producers pumped out the brine so quickly and recklessly that the salt concentration began to decrease rapidly as fresh groundwater came in. The fresh water quickly absorbed the salt that formed the supporting pillars, and the ground collapsed, forming a great many sinkholes. But because the sinkholes were located far from the sites where the pumping took place (in some cases, several miles away), it was impossible for people who had lost their homes to the subsidence to pin the blame on any particular salt producer.

None of this is in any way reassuring. Regardless of the geological and topographical features of the ground you’re walking on, there’s always the chance that some unknown empty space—whether natural or artificial—lurks below, waiting to envelop you in a sinkhole on your very next step. It happens with tragic frequency, though usually not on a scale sufficient to merit widespread attention. But then, you can’t really prepare for a sinkhole the way you prepare for an earthquake, so maybe ignorance is bliss.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on December 2, 2004.

Image credit: KiwiDandy [Public Domain], via Flickr

Yes, I’m aware: the Earth rotates all day, every day. But on this date in 1851, Léon Foucault proved it scientifically by setting his eponymous pendulum in motion in Paris. You can see replicas of this pendulum in science and natural history museums all over the world. They’re kind of boring to watch, as they very slowly change direction and periodically knock over little pegs. But that subtle change in direction would occur only if the Earth is rotating. This simple invention was and remains a brilliant demonstration of what to many of us is a self-evident truth.

Image credit: BrokenSphere [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], from Wikimedia Commons