“You” Avoidance
The use of second person pronouns is one of the most difficult areas of Indonesian. Even the few tentative steps we are starting to take at this point present fairly formidable, prickly, subtle…
Bapak and Ibu
In English, basically we have just one second person pronoun: “you”. Except in a few exceptional circumstances, “you” can be used to address practically anyone at all. In some European languages there are…
Is Indonesian a non-sexist language?
The third-person pronouns of English compel us to specify male (he, his), female (she, her) or non-human (it, its). Similarly, when we are talking about relatives our language mostly uses terms like brother,…
Anda and Kamu
There are many words for “you”: Anda is just one of them and is by no means the most commonly used. In fact Anda is a fairly recent invention, dating from the 1950s. It is…
‘Bapak’ with Capital Letter?
You should note that when the kinship terms bapak (a father) and ibu (a mother) are used as second person pronouns (i.e. meaning “you”) they are written with an initial capital letter, but when they are…
Kami versus Kita
“We” is a small word and it can sometimes be a small problem for English speaking students of Indonesian. The problem is that there are two words for “we” in Indonesian: kami and…
-Nya
“–nya” is used as the counterpart of the English possessive pronoun “its”, i.e. it refers to something inanimate or non-human. It makes no distinction between male and female. If you really need to know the…
