Arabic language in contemporary Indonesian
To my surprise, however, back at the language institute the next day, I
found that my knowledgeable teacher did not know some of these
Indonesian words of Arabic origin, although they appear in various
Indonesian dictionaries.
The same phenomenon was illustrated by Russell Jones, who, after the
publication in 1978 of his list of loan words in Indonesian, asked
three young university lecturers in Indonesia to examine this list
independently.In the era of Dutch Arabist and colonial advisor
Snouck Hurgronje, it was apparently still possible to find people in
Indonesia who spoke Arabic as their mother tongue. Most of them were from Hadramaut or other parts of southern Arabia. Although Snouck Hurgronje met most of his Hadrami informants while in Mecca, he also spoke with Arabs in the Dutch Indies. Whereas there are still many Indonesians of clearly
identifiable Arab origin (mainly Hadrami), there are hardly any among
this community who are still able to speak Arabic, let alone any
authentic, colloquial variety of Arabic. One of
the main reasons for the fact that Arabic has almost entirely
disappeared as a mother tongue in Indonesia is that most Arab
immigrants married Indonesian women and their offspring learned only
the language of the mother. have not discovered any unique, isolated variety of Arabic existing in Indonesia as a kind of "linguistic island". And I am not aware of the existence of such a phenomenon in the past.
And even if a perfect understanding of the Koran could
be obtained, this would not necessarily result in an ability to
converse in Arabic about mundane issues.I was surprised by her ability to work with a text such as this, which is challenging even for advanced students of Arabic.
Nevertheless, even very accomplished students of Arabic who have
mastered complicated texts such as this would not necessarily be able
to communicate orally in classical Arabic.
There are many studies concerning the Arabic component of Indonesian
and the way that Arabic words have entered Bahasa Malayu and Bahasa
Indonesia.
There are also studies that address the notion that, for Indonesians,
studying Arabic may be uniquely challenging because of the Indonesian
linguistic background.
As there are many Indonesians of south Arabian origin,
one would expect to find at least some residue of dialects from regions
such as Hadramaut or other parts of South Yemen. But this occurs rarely, if at all.
Nearly all the Indonesians I have met who do speak good Arabic have
studied or lived for some time in the Arab world, whether Cairo,
al-Madinah, Baghdad or elsewhere. Knowledge of Arabic among Indonesians is almost exclusively derived from studying the Koran or Islamic subjects in general.
Those who fully master Arabic have either studied it at an Islamic
university, institute or pesantren, or have studied and lived for a
long period in the Arab world. In such
situations usage of Arabic is usually obligatory, including in the case
of an Indonesian pesantren, such as the one in Gontor, East Java.
An "Indonesianized" variety of Arabic, existing as a kind of
"linguistic island", separate from dialects such as Hadrami Arabic,
does not presently exist -- if it ever did.
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