January 20, 2020—Alan W
What follows are my impressions of Indonesian from going through a couple books, using a few dictionaries, and trying to converse with some fluent speakers over the course of a few years or so.
Indonesian (called Bahasa Indonesia the "Indonesian Language") is the official/national language of Indonesia. It is a flavor of Malay and is very similar to Malaysian (Bahasa Melayu), perhaps in a way analagous to how British/American English or varieties of Spanish across the globe differ from one another.
"Indonesian" was not always spoken in Indonesia. The "Indonesian" being discussed here descends from a variety of Malay by traders in the region. Nationalists in the 20th century created Indonesian through standardization efforts, promoting this common language over other languages such as the Javanese language, which was already spoken natively by a large portion of present day Indonesia's population.
Indonesian stands out among the world's language in being a "native" national language (c.f. Spanish in Latin America, French in North Africa) of a relatively large nation state that went through long periods of occupation.
Wikpedia cites 43 million native speakers and 156 million second language (L2) speakers (2010 census). Of these L2 speakers, Wikipedia states
...over 200 million people regularly make use of the national language, with varying degrees of proficiency.
Indonesia's population as of 2010 is estimated to be 237.64 million (Wikipedia). This means that roughly 18% of Indonesia's population claim to be native speakers and that 65% claim some degree of proficiency.
These figures are hard to make sense of without further information about how proficiency of speakers was measured among other things. However, there are at least a couple things we can conclude pretty decisively:
As Indonesia's population continues to grow as well as its rates of urbanization, I predict that the use of Indonesian will likely grow as well, at least within urban areas.
Indonesian looks very approachable. If you naïvely tried to pronounce the following paragraph, you'd probably do a half-decent job, particularly if you have had experience learning another language or were taught the basics of Indonesian pronunciation for even less than an hour.
Bahasa Indonesia adalah bahasa Melayu yang dijadikan sebagai bahasa resmi Republik Indonesia dan bahasa persatuan bangsa Indonesia. Bahasa Indonesia diresmikan penggunaannya setelah Proklamasi Kemerdekaan Indonesia, tepatnya sehari sesudahnya, bersamaan dengan mulai berlakunya konstitusi. Di Timor Leste, bahasa Indonesia berstatus sebagai bahasa kerja.
As with other languages with relatively newly created writing systems, Indonesian spelling has a very close correspondence with actual prounciation. Learning a couple of simple rules (e.g. 'c' is pronounced like 'ch' in English) you can quickly get up to speed pronouncing understandable Indonesian.
A quick look at the paragraph above reveals much. Notice that Indonesian does not have complex consonant clusters (think German words schl..., Russian words vl...). Punctuation, spacing, capitalization and other conventions are very similar to those of European languages (c.f. Chinese and Japanese don't use spaces). You won't have to learn a new keyboard layout to type Indonesian—lots of things here should look very familiar.
To hear a sample of spoken Indonesia, check out Voice of America Indonesia (long samples of relatively formal spoken Indonesian).
Indonesian vocabulary comes from many sources including Malay, Javanese, Chinese, Dutch, and English. As with many other languages, many more recent borrowings are from English or are transparently related to English words by shared (European) origin. In the quote below, I bolded (English) cognate words:
Setiap paginya, VOA menyiarkan sebuah program informatif sejam penuh. Siaran Pagi menghidangkan beragam topik yang menarik;berita internasional dan nasional, tajuk rencana, bisnis dan keuangan [...]
In discussing about science and technology, society, business government, and other topics of "higher learning", you can expect many, many English cognates.
I imagine talking about religious matters (e.g. aspects of Islam in Indonesia) there are many, many Arabic, Persian, etc. loan words.
Indonesian is in many ways a very simple language. Native speakers may describe it as having "no grammar", reflecting the fact that it does not have complex verb conjugations, gender on nouns, or a case system (at least in the same sort of explicitly marked, formally established way that European languages do). etc.
The biggest challenge I found studying Indonesian was finding current, comprehensive resources. Not yet being proficient enough to use monolingual Indonesian resources (e.g. the Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia "Big Indonesian Dictionary" KBBI), I mostly had resources targeted at either academics (grammars describing the language, but not made for teaching) and tourists (quick and easy phrase books) at my disposal. With my background studying East Asian languages, I could make use of resources such as Naver and Daum's online dictionaries (Korean). I imagine in Asia and Australia there are more resources available for learning Indonesian.
Indonesian grammar is something that it is difficult to find rigorous descriptions of. Unlike languages such as French and Japanese where resources abound, Indonesian resources are not always easy to find and may not be many decades old.
It might make sense to study some Indonesian if one of the two statements below is true of you.
However, Indonesian has some tough competition, even within Indonesia.
Indonesian seems to be a fairly useful language in Indonesia, but probably not the only one you will need to get a good understanding of what is going on there.