Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia
People in America really don&#x27;t appreciate the blessing of having a single (nearly) uniformly spoken language. Being able to drop in anywhere in a country of 300+ million people and being able to <i>converse</i> with the locals (not just <i>communicate</i>, but convey your deepest thoughts)--it&#x27;s a benefit the vast majority of people in the world simply do not have.<p>This article touches on something I&#x27;ve been thinking a lot about lately--the deepness of language. I think people have this vision of a polyglot future with automatic computer translation. I think that&#x27;s quite short sighted and misses how deep language goes. My mom, who was born in Bangladesh, learned English in school and moved to the U.S. as an adult. Though she has been in the U.S. for thirty years, she will never be able to communicate in English with the level of sophistication she does in Bengali. Indeed, even we (her family who know better) perceive her as someone capable of a limited range of thinking as a result of the limited range of what she can express verbally in English.<p>All that resulted in quite a shock for us when she started using Facebook. On Facebook, she can sit and mull things over and think about what she wants to say. So we&#x27;ll be taken aback by her posts quoting Dostoevsky or whatever (she was a voracious reader of classic literature translated into Bengali). It&#x27;s a stark example how hobbling it can be to be forced to communicate in a language that is not one&#x27;s own (an idea the article delves into). It also makes me skeptical of any idea that we can establish meaningful communications built on automated translation.