In Reply to: footy? posted by Moosey on Thursday, 25. August 2005 at 07:34 Bali Time:
There's still a couple of hundred languages being spoken in Indonesia. I think originally there were over 600. Many have fallen out of use, except in the more remote vilages.
In central Java, it's common to hear people conversing in Jawa, and you can tell the difference from Bahasa Indonesia immediately. The first time I heard it up close was when a friend of mine was talking to her mother on her hand-phone, and afterwards I asked if they had been arguing, because she seemed to be barking at her. But no... they had just been speaking Jawa, which has a more gutteral sound, compared to the very clipped Bahasa Indonesia.
I don't recall hearing Jawa in Jakarta, though I did hear a few other dialects used briefly when people with the same origins got together. I probably heard more dialects than I realise, though, because my Indonesian isn't very good, and I would have missed most of them.
And I'm not really sure what the correct shortening of "football" is in Indonesian. Maybe it's "bol". But the sentence would have lost some of it's context, I think. But then, I'm not sure I got the syntax right, anyway. I was hoping Peter would have corrected it by now, if it's wrong.
And there's quite a few Balinese who can speak English, but are not fluent in Bahasa Indonesia. This can lead to weird situations, like when I was practicing my Indonesian, and a Balinese lady was translating what I said into English so her Balinese friend could understand it. Kind of pointless, but fun.