Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia
Some things I learned when I was in Singapore and Indonesia about 10 years ago:<p>- Our Singaporean host had business dealings in Indonesia and he said he could get by just relying on his Malay language skills, so it seems that Malay and Bahasa Indonesia have a decent degree of mutual intelligibility.<p>- In one of the national museums we ran into an American professor who had been teaching part time in Indonesia for many years.  Among other things, he mentioned that when Indonesia was founded, the government created a standard vocabulary for the language at the same time.  He thought that that was one of the smartest things they&#x27;d done.<p>- One Indonesian woman that I spoke with (who I presume was Javanese) mentioned that one of the benefits of Bahasa Indonesia was that the Javanese in one village might not be mutually intelligible (in the practical sense, anyway) with the Javanese spoken in another village a few miles away.  But you could always switch to Bahasa Indonesia to communicate.<p>- The word &quot;Bahasa&quot; means &quot;language&quot;, and in Indonesian languages always seemed to be prefixed with &quot;&quot;Bahasa&quot;, e.g. &quot;bahasa Indonesia&quot;, &quot;bahasa Inggris&quot;, &quot;bahasa Jerman&quot;.  However, I recall several times hearing Indonesians using just the word &quot;bahasa&quot; when clearly referring to the Indonesian language.  This was speaking in English though, so it might not be representative of how they&#x27;d say it in Indonesian.