[iafisher]

Claims about the relative simplicity or complexity of different languages are rarely grounded in actual linguistic evidence. Languages comprise so many parts that it's not even clear what the basis of comparison could be: is English, a language with highly restricted word order but without grammatical case marked on most nouns, more complex than Russian, a language with comparatively free word order but a highly articulated case system? Who can say?

With that in mind, the statements about Bahasa Indonesian being simpler or more rigid than other languages are more like social or cultural judgments than bonafide linguistic facts.

[notahacker]

I'm not even convinced the basic argument that a language with 40-odd million people regarding it as their primary language is not widely spoken is true (never mind the ludicrously false clickbaity "no-one speaks" headline). Sure, more Indonesians speak other languages at home and with fellow native speakers because they're the local languages of particular areas, some of which were more widely spoken than the Malay dialect Bahasa Indonesian was based on in the first place, or else closely identified with their ethnic and cultural backgrounds. And the fact that Bahasa Indonesia is the main language of domestic politics and education (and largely irrelevant outside Indonesia) means that people who speak the languages of their ancestors are bound to view speaking it instead of their local dialect as stuffy and formal regardless of its linguistic characteristics (see also: other multilingual countries) and bound to create slang versions that incorporate their local words which aren't particularly intelligible to foreigners schooled in the classroom version.

And I don't think even English, usually the sole language spoken by native speakers and definitely not lacking in standard phrases and vocabulary, would pass the author's litmus test of "do native speakers in different regions of England all speak it in everyday conversation in a manner so close to the textbooks a foreigner can easily understand it"

[jamiek88]

Visit Newcastle, Liverpool or Glasgow and I think a lot of people basing their English comprehension on the ‘BBC’ accent will not have an easy time, I agree.

[dejv]

True, I am fairly fluent in English, but when I moved to Liverpool I was lost and even ordering some basic stuff was often challenge. Even now when I get back I need some time to get used to their accent.

[decode]

While I agree with you in general, a surprising number of grammatical features that make many other languages difficult to learn are missing in Indonesian. Some examples:

No grammatical gender

No plural forms of nouns

No grammatical case

No verb conjugations

No verb tenses

In addition, written Indonesian uses the Latin alphabet and has a very consistent phonemic orthography.

Of course, it also has some more complicated features, like formal and informal pronouns. But it still seems fair to me to say that it is grammatically simpler than many (most?) other spoken languages.

[tikwidd]

I don't think that is fair to say. There are lots of other languages that lack most/all of these features (e.g. Mandarin has no gender, limited number marking, no case marking, lack of inflections). Indonesian is not unique in that regard.

Indonesian verbs lack the tense, number and person agreement marking that is commonly found in European languages, but they have a lot of derivational morphology including complex voice and valency operations (Austronesian alignment[0], causatives, applicatives etc.)

Indonesian also has noun classifiers like Mandarin which have to be memorised like grammatical genders.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_alignment

[perlancar3]

Yup, typically what a native Indonesian would say about how easy their language is. But foreigners are often tripped with other aspects of the grammar, which the native take for granted, such as those tikwidd mentions: noun classifiers, morphological derivation, a high number of prefixes/suffixes/infixes and their combination, lack of cue on how to pronounce the different "e" vowels, etc.

[simias]

I don't quite understand your comment in relation with the article. The main subject isn't the complexity or simplicity of the language but rather that it's not effectively used by the population at large which makes it a relatively inefficient tool for communication. He mentions that the language "has fewer words than most languages" but that's not his main point.

This text is also clearly not meant as a treatise of linguistics about Bahasa Indonesia, it's more of a cultural trivia piece so I don't think it's really fair to criticize the lack of cold hard linguistic facts. It's also an important piece of information for anybody considering learning the language, as it turns out that it might not be as useful as one might guess even if you plan to live in Indonesia.

I do challenge your assertion that "claims about the relative simplicity or complexity of different languages are rarely grounded in actual linguistic evidence". It's true that it's very hard to judge the "absolute" difficulty of a language because everybody has very profound cultural and linguistic biases. It's also true that it's not generally a very useful information, I don't know which of Italian or Vietnamese is objectively harder but I know that as a speaker of French and English I'd probably have an easier time learning the former than the latter.

That being said I think if you're familiar enough with the languages you're "rating" you can come up with a pretty decent classification of "absolute" difficulty. For instance I'd personally consider Portuguese to be objectively harder than Spanish, because while they're extremely similar languages Portuguese does have an objectively more complex phonology and slightly trickier grammar. I would also say that French is "absolutely" more difficult than Italian because of the more complex spelling and phonology.

Chinese is widely considered a difficult language, partly because it's tonal (and you could say that's cultural bias) but also because of its very complex writing system. I don't think anybody could say that the differences in difficulty between written Spanish and written Chinese can only be attributed to cultural judgement.

[iafisher]

> For instance I'd PERSONALLY consider Portuguese to be OBJECTIVELY harder than Spanish.

Emphasis mine.

I don't mean to say that some languages aren't more difficult for speakers of a particular language to learn--no doubt French is easier for English speakers to learn than Chinese. A speaker of a different language that is also tonal would likely find Chinese easier to learn, though. What you're really measuring is not complexity but similarity.

You have a good point that some languages may have more difficult writing systems than others. Linguists traditionally don't consider orthography to be part of a language proper, as a language can have multiple writing systems (like Serbo-Croatian) or none at all, but you're right that most people don't make that fine a distinction between language and writing system.

I didn't mean to be overly critical of the article, which I mostly enjoyed, but saying that a language is "simple" or "rigid" carries a lot of cultural and political baggage--think about how Europeans of the colonial period denigrated African languages, or how in the United States, Australia and Canada indigenous children were punished for using their own language.

[foldr]

No-one disputes that some writing systems are more complex than others, but statements like an "objectively more complex phonology" or "slightly trickier grammar" are pretty difficult to cash out in precise terms.

We know that kids learn all of these languages at the same pace, which suggests that the complexity differences between spoken languages are not particularly significant from the point of view of someone who doesn't already speak a language.

[bfred_it]

Some languages are objectively easier than others, at least in part.

Latin languages like Italian, Spanish and French have literally dozens of conjugations[0] where English usually handles all tenses and quantity with "will, would, did, had, -ed" plus a handful of irregular verbs, which themselves have two words to learn each (unlike Italian irregular verbs [1])

Spanish and Italian are only easier to read and write since their spelling is regular for the most part.

[0]: https://www.wordreference.com/conj/ItVerbs.aspx?v=sbottonare [1]: https://www.wordreference.com/conj/ItVerbs.aspx?v=andare

[foldr]

>Latin languages like Italian, Spanish and French have literally dozens of conjugations[0] where English usually handles all tenses and quantity with "will, would, did, had, -ed" plus a handful of irregular verbs, which themselves have two words to learn each (unlike Italian irregular verbs [1])

That's just one point of comparison, though. You can also identify features of English which appear to be more complex. For example, English has phrasal verbs, two forms of the possessive, VP ellipsis and antecedent contained deletion, a greater number of nominalization constructions, a greater number of ECM constructions, etc. etc. No-one has come up with any sensible measure of complexity according to which any of these languages is clearly more complex than another.

>Spanish and Italian are only easier to read and write since their spelling is regular for the most part.

No-one claims that all writing systems are equally simple. Indeed, some are easier to learn than others.

[perlancar3]

By the way, how should one measure language difficulty objectively? I think one proxy can be: the number of years a non-native learner typically requires before reaching a certain level.

[DennisP]

A couple years ago I read a book about learning languages, by a guy who'd learned 30 languages to some degree and was fluent in seven. In his opinion, Indonesian was the easiest to learn by far. He gave various reasons, but what sticks in my mind is that to make any noun plural, you just say it twice.

(But I've also read that simple languages tend to develop a lot of extra nuances that native speakers use to add expressiveness, so there's a larger gap between just being able to communicate, and sounding like a native speaker.)

[hikarudo]

I think that book is titled "How to learn any language", by Barry Farber.

[DennisP]

That does ring a bell.

[curtis]

> Claims about the relative simplicity or complexity of different languages are rarely grounded in actual linguistic evidence.

I don't think that's justified in the case of Bahasa Indonesia, or indeed any language which is more widely used as a second language than as a first. And it's pretty much a dialect of Malay, which also has a long history as a second language used for trade.

[foobaw]

Would a polyglot with a linguistics background be someone with enough credentials to make comparisons though? I agree though that it's hard to have a baseline or even quantify simplicity/complexity in languages.

[amaccuish]

I think it's more about it being a second language. People usually don't have too many difficulties with their mother tongue. The problem comes, as this article implies, when people try to learn a second, especially when they're not experienced in language learning. This is the case here because they're trying to get many different groups to move to a standardised language. A simpler grammar makes a lot of difference in cases like these.

[MarkMc]

I don't know what counts as bonafide linguistic facts but when I studied Indonesian I was struck by how much more regular and simpler it was than English. For example:

umum = public, pengumuman = announcement

adil = fair, pengadilan = court/trial

jahat = evil, penjahat = criminal