Indonesian loanwords in Dutch
PRESENTATION LINGUISTICS
/INTRODUCTION:
We are going to talk about Dutch loanwords in Indonesian.
About 20% of Indonesian words can be traced back to Dutch words. Some of these words are academic terms, for example terms in law, which is the reason that for many studies in Indonesia, it is compulsory to take a course of Dutch Language. But the Dutch influence is also visible in everyday Indonesian language. I personally thought that the reason for this would be obvious: the Dutch were present for almost 350 years in what is now Indonesia during the colonial period. But then we found that only a very small minority of Indonesians ever had fluent knowledge of Dutch. We thought it would be interesting to see why regardless of this, it is still the case that around 10.000 Indonesian words have Dutch origin.
Besides this, there is always the question why a borrowing had to take place at all, because all languages have the means to create novel expressions out of their own resources. Instead of borrowing a word, they could simply make up a new word. In this presentation, we will explore how it came to be that there are so many loanwords from Dutch in the contemporary Indonesian language. In order to properly study this, we will first give an overview of the historical background of Indonesia and the Netherlands. Secondly, we will look at the reasons for borrowing and the ways in which lexical borrowing took place. Finally, the semantic word fields will be dealt with.
Before we start looking at the history of Indonesian language, it is necessary to define some technical terms. A loanword can be defined as a word that at some point in the history of a language entered its lexicon as a result of borrowing. Borrowing here means all kinds of transfer or copying processes, whether they are due to native speakers adopting elements from other languages into the recipient language, or whether the result from non-native speakers imposing properties of their native language onto
/INTRODUCTION:
We are going to talk about Dutch loanwords in Indonesian.
About 20% of Indonesian words can be traced back to Dutch words. Some of these words are academic terms, for example terms in law, which is the reason that for many studies in Indonesia, it is compulsory to take a course of Dutch Language. But the Dutch influence is also visible in everyday Indonesian language. I personally thought that the reason for this would be obvious: the Dutch were present for almost 350 years in what is now Indonesia during the colonial period. But then we found that only a very small minority of Indonesians ever had fluent knowledge of Dutch. We thought it would be interesting to see why regardless of this, it is still the case that around 10.000 Indonesian words have Dutch origin.
Besides this, there is always the question why a borrowing had to take place at all, because all languages have the means to create novel expressions out of their own resources. Instead of borrowing a word, they could simply make up a new word. In this presentation, we will explore how it came to be that there are so many loanwords from Dutch in the contemporary Indonesian language. In order to properly study this, we will first give an overview of the historical background of Indonesia and the Netherlands. Secondly, we will look at the reasons for borrowing and the ways in which lexical borrowing took place. Finally, the semantic word fields will be dealt with.
Before we start looking at the history of Indonesian language, it is necessary to define some technical terms. A loanword can be defined as a word that at some point in the history of a language entered its lexicon as a result of borrowing. Borrowing here means all kinds of transfer or copying processes, whether they are due to native speakers adopting elements from other languages into the recipient language, or whether the result from non-native speakers imposing properties of their native language onto
References: Haspelmath, M., Tadmor, U., 2009. Loanwords in the World 's Languages: A Comparative Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 1081 pp. Hiramoto, M. 2007. Lexical strata of Indonesian vocabulary",Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University Matras, Y., & Sakel, J., 2007. Grammatical borrowing in cross-linguistic perspective. New York: Mouton de Gruyter Hassall, T. et al., 2008. Attitudes towards Western loanwords in Indonesian. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2008, Vol.2008(189), pp.55-84