by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/05/24 07:40 -07:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/05/24/10013991.aspx
Previously published at http://blogs.msdn.com/A10013991.aspx on the old server, now published here....
Now at long last I can point everyone to the Indonesian Language Interface Pack for Windows 7!
It is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems, and you can get it right here.
Yet another LIP brought to you by the Local Language Program,. sponsored by public Sector.
Indonesian is a huge market that is growing very fast (as befits the language known by such a uge percentage of all the people of Indonesia, in the fourth largest country in the world!).
A little background information on Indonesian:
NUMBER OF SPEAKERS:
30 million native, 140 million second language speakers
NAME IN THE LANGUAGE ITSELF:
Bahasa Indonesia
Indonesian is the official language of Indonesia since the country's independence in 1945. It is spoken by about 30 million native speakers, mostly on the island of Java, while another 140 million use it as a second language in the multilingual archipelago. Most formal education in Indonesia is in Indonesia as are nearly all national media, and the government is promoting the language.
Linguistically spoken, it is a variant of a diasystem, representing a standardized dialect of Malay, which has been a trade language in the region for at least a thousand years. While Malay borrowed many words from English in colonial times, Indonesian was influenced by Dutch. The word for exhaust pipe demonstrates this very strikingly: it is knalpot in Indonesian, but ekzos (from exhaust) in Malay. Today, many words from other languages spoken in Indonesia, most prominently from Javanese, are finding their way into the Indonesian language.
As in Bahasa Melayu (Malay), the Bahasa in Bahasa Indonesia simply means language, so shortening the name to Bahasa does not make any sense.
FUN FACTS:
Indonesian shows the influences of many languages in its vocabulary: A lot of different peoples coming into the area brought new concepts and left their traces:
- From Sanskrit, words like agama (religion), bahasa (language) or pustaka (book) were borrowed;
- Arabic left kitab (book) or halal (lawful);
- portuguese keju (cheese, from queijo), mentega (butter, from manteiga), sepatu (shoe, from sapato), or jendela (window, from janela);
- Dutch more than 10,000 words, among them kantor (office, from kantoor), rekening (account, from rekening), kartu (card, from kaart), apotek (pharmacy, from apotheek) or buku (book, from boek).
As the word book, appearing three times in the list above, shows, Indonesian often draws from different foreign sources and the different loanwords can have slightly different meanings.
CLASSIFICATION:
Indonesian belongs to the Western Malayo-Polynesian languages, along with languages like Javanese, Balinese, which are also spoken in Indonesia, Malagasy, spoken in Madagascar, or Tagalog, spoken in the Philippines. The Malayo-Polynesian languages form a subgroup of the Austronesian language family.
SCRIPT:
Indonesian is written in Latin script. In 1972 Indonesia and Malaysia agreed on a unified spelling for Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Melayu. The Indonesian spelling until then had still shown major influences of Dutch, like the tj which was used for the sound in the beginning of the English chin, or the dj.
For more information on Indonesian, click here.
Enjoy!