Last updated on August 31, 2021
Contributed and posted by ‘The Indonesian Way’, a textbook for the Indonesian language by George Quinn and Uli Kozok.
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, sister, father, niece, nephew, uncle, aunt etc that force us to specify the gender of the person concerned. (There are exceptions, sibling, cousin and parent are three.)
In Indonesian gender-specific terms are not as common as in English, in fact most terms are gender-neutral. Third person pronouns, for example, are all gender-neutral: dia (also ia) means “he” or “she”, depending on the context, and the possessive suffix –nya can mean “his”, “her”, or “its”, again depending on context. Most (but by no means all) kinship terms in Indonesian are gender-neutral too. So Indonesians say anak (child), saudara (sibling), kakak (older sibling) and adik (younger sibling). A mother may introduce her daughter by saying (pointing at her):
Ini anak saya. Dia berumur sepuluh tahun.
This is my daughter. She is ten years old.
She could also introduce her son using exactly the same words.
Ini anak saya. Dia berumur sepuluh tahun.
This is my son. He is ten years old.
In short, in everyday conversation Indonesians don’t usually make a point of specifying the sex of the person they are talking about, or the sex of a sibling, unless there is a particular reason to do so.
This can sometimes be a problem for English-speaking learners of the language. Sometimes English speakers feel that they must specify gender when they are speaking Indonesian, but it is important to suppress this impulse. If you can do this (and for English speakers it is not easy) you will will begin to feel what it is like to get inside another way – an Indonesian way – of viewing the world.