Mother Tongue but Not Really: Learning Malay as an Indonesian
In 2010, as I enrolled into a Singaporean secondary school, I became one of many Indonesian students in Singapore who took Malay Language as our Mother Tongue subject in school. While to non-Malay or non-Indonesian speakers the two languages are similar, Malay and Indonesian languages are two functionally different languages.
I spent months leading up to my first day as a secondary school student in Singapore watching Upin dan Ipin, a Malaysian children’s animated show that happened to be airing in Indonesia at the time. The show, I remember clearly, was subtitled — and that was how I first realised just how different Malay and Indonesian are.
I very quickly realised how inadequate my crash course with Upin dan Ipin was. I walked into that class thinking I would at least understand what was going on in class, but I didn’t understand at least half the time. Not only were there words that I was unfamiliar with, the enunciation of the words and speed of talking made it really hard to understand, and I generally survived my assignments by using very formal words, since a lot of them are loanwords from English — I just needed to change the ‘C’s to ‘K’s and ‘Y’s to ‘I’s, or ‘-tion’ to ‘-si’ in a lot of those.
It was the easy way out, I suppose. Loanwords from English exist within the Indonesian language universe, too, typically with localised spelling. Words like ‘kolaborasi’ (collaboration), ‘ekonomi’ (economy), ‘interaksi’ (interaction) were my best friends, because these were words that I was familiar with back home. It’s quite amusing to me, how I can use these words for a class in a language I did not completely understand, which still share the same root as my own, and that root is a third completely separate language, foreign to both.
Spelling however turned out to be a bigger problem than I thought it would be. Making spelling errors only for Malay words that I’d just heard, or for words that are very different from Indonesian (‘televisyen’, pronounced like television, took me a while to process) would have been understandable. I did not know I could misspell something I have been spelling correctly all my life.
The word was ‘jawab’ — it means “to answer” in both Malay and Indonesian. The root word is spelled with a ‘b’ in both languages. However, funnily enough, when you add ‘-an’ in the end (“the answer”), it is spelled as ‘jawaban’ in Indonesian, but spelled with a ‘p’ — ‘jawapan’ — in Malay. Losing several marks on the exam because of a stupid letter was annoying, and confusing, because… what’s the logic behind it, again? (Fun fact: the teacher couldn’t explain why ‘jawapan’ is spelled with a ‘p’ — he, too, thought this was rather peculiar.)
I started making friends after a few months in school, and I had invited one girl from Malay class, let’s call her A, over to my place to eat Indomie (yes, this was a thing), since I had just returned from my semester break in Jakarta, and I brought over some fancy-flavored Indomie.
“I’ve got lots of variants,” I told A, “go on, pick one that you want.” I opened the cabinet where I stored my precious instant noodles. Rendang, soto, chicken curry, extra spicy, and other traditional food-inspired variants of Indomie were available for A to choose.
“What’s this? Sop buntut?? Why do you eat buntut?” A asked me, finding it both funny and disturbing at the same time.
“Uh, ’cause it’s nice?” I didn’t understand her question. Sop buntut, or oxtail soup, is quite a popular delicacy back home.
A: “…but it’s buntut.”
Me: “Yeah. Tail? It’s, uh, oxtail?”
A: “Right, yeah. In Malay, it means ‘butt’. I am not eating butt soup.”
I tried to persuade her that it tastes good and it is not, in fact, butt soup. She chose rendang-flavored Indomie instead.
I had been reluctant about formally learning Malay and having to call the subject Mother Tongue, as I did not recognise it to be the same language I grew up speaking. The truth is, I disliked how it messes with what I considered to be my identity.
I eventually got over that: for one, I still have to pass the class, so why bother with the agony? I began to approach learning Malay like how I would with any other language that I’d learn — that is, with genuine interest to understand it.
Plus, it also allowed me to bond with my Malay-speaking classmates later on (being able to properly gossip about other people in a language only a handful of us know?? Fun), and gave me a Minah alter ego, which is interesting, to say the least.
Written by Rafika Kusuma
