Dr. Uli Kozok

You arrive in a new city and you don’t know the way to your hotel or a specific restaurant. How do you ask for directions? And if you are in a bus, how do you ask where to get off?

When people ask me “Do you speak bahasa?” my answer is “Of course!” Almost every human being speaks a language!

It also happens quite often that I get a request to translate a text into “Bahasa“. Bahasa means ‘language’, and nothing else. So what “Bahasa“, please?

The word bahasa is derived from the Sanskrit language, and is used for many Indian and Southeast Asian languages, but most commonly for Indonesian (bahasa Indonesia), Malay (bahasa Melayu), and Malaysian (bahasa Malaysia). So, referring to Indonesian as Bahasa is not only not correct, but also potentially misleading.

So why do so many people think that bahasa is part of the name of the Indonesian language? Some people even call it “Bahasa Indonesian”!

It is probably because Indonesians call their language bahasa Indonesia. Bahasa is an integral part that has to be attached when you refer to any language. French is bahasa Perancis, Spanish is bahasa Spanyol, and Japanese is bahasa Jepang.

Bahasa is used as a classifier for languages just as much as orang is a classifier for people, and burung a classifier for birds: a Spaniard is orang Spanyol, a Japanese orang Jepang, and a pigeon is burung merpati.

Indonesians always refer to their own language as bahasa Indonesia, never as Bahasa. A guru bahasa is a language teacher, not an Indonesian language teacher; ilmu bahasa is linguistics, tata bahasa is grammar etc.

In Indonesian, bahasa is written with lowercase /b/: It is bahasa Indonesia and not Bahasa Indonesia clearly indicating that bahasa is not part of the name of the language.

Here some common phrases using bahasa:

bahasa daerah regional language
bahasa asing foreign language
bahasa persatuan the language of unity (i.e. Indonesian)
bahasa Inggris English
bahasa Belanda Dutch
bahasa komputer computer language
bahasa isyarat sign language
berbahasa to speak a language

And finally we have bahasa tarzan or Tarzan language. This term is used when two people who speak different languages trying to communicate with each other only being able to use some rudiment phrases paired with a copious amount of sign language.

Sambal Hati Petai

The word hati means ‘liver’. Indonesians love eating liver, especially chicken liver which is often prepared with chili, fried potatoes, and petai, which in English is named ‘stink bean’. It indeed has a strong smell that is not everyone’s cup of tea (but I personally love them!). You can find hundreds of recipes of this very popular side dish by searching for sambal hati ayam petai.

In Indonesia, the liver (hati), and not the heart (jantung), is the organ that is associated with feelings.

Here are a few phrases that are all based on hati. The most popular and most useful is hati-hati, which, probably surprisingly for most of you, means ‘watch out!’. When you drive through Indonesia, you will find many signs warning you: Hati-hati. Banyak anak-anak, which means ‘ Caution. Many Children’.

However, most phrases with hati do have to do with emotions. This is only a small selection; there are dozens more phrases based on hati!

Highly recommended for further reading:

Siahaan, Poppy. “Did he break your heart or your liver? A contrastive study on metaphorical concepts from the source domain ORGAN in English and in Indonesian” pp.45-74

Cliff Goddard.”Contrastive semantics and cultural psychology: English heart vs. Malay hati”.

Both articles were published in In Sharifian, Farzad, René Dirven, Ning Yu und Susanne Niemeier (eds.).2008. Culture, body, and language: Conceptualizations of internal body organs across cultures and languages. 2008. Berlin, New York. Mouton de Gruyter.

Genit is one of those words in the Indonesian language for which there is no easy translation available. Genit is an adjective that describes a girl or woman (and occasionally also a male person) who acts in an unusual way to attract the attention of usually the opposite sex. Possible translations are ‘coquettish’, ‘flirtatious’, ‘whimsical’, ‘kittenish’, ‘playfully coy’, and ‘fanciful’.

The KBBI (Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia) defines genit as bergaya-gaya ‘to show off in a stylish or playful way’, and as banyak tingkahnya ‘a girl of many whims’. And yes, genit is a combination of the two definitions.

Here’s a video of a toddler behaving in a genit way: