Media Penyiaran

The Indonesian name for the language is Bahasa Indonesia literally means ‘the language of Indonesia’. This term can sometimes be searched in written or spoken English. In addition, to the language it sometimes referred to as "Bahasa" by English-speakers, though this simply means "language" and thus is also not an official term for Indonesian.

Indonesian language scripts are written using the Latin alphabet. It is more phonetically consistent than many languages and the correspondence between sounds and their written forms is generally regular.

Writing System

Consonants are represented in a way similar to Italian language, for example

• c is always /ʧ/ (like English "tch")
• g is always /g/ ("hard")
• j represents /ʤ/ as it does in English.
• In addition, ny represents the palatal nasal /ɲ
• ng is used for the velar nasal /ŋ
• sy for /ʃ/ (English "sh")
• Kh for the voiceless velar fricative /x.
• Two of /e/ and /ə/ are represented with an e.

The spelling changes in the language that has occurred since Indonesian independence. Commonly-used changes include,

Grammatical gender

There are some words created with gendered, for instance putri means ‘daughter’, and putra means ‘son’ and also pramugara means ‘air steward’ (male flight attendant) and pramugari meaning ‘air stewardess’(female flight attendant).Simlarly  olahragawan,  equates to ‘sportsman’, and olahragawati, meaning sportswoman.Words like these (or certain suffixes such as "-a and "-i" or "-wan" and "wati") are absorbed from other

Languages. In some regions of Indonesia like Sumatera and Jakarta, abang (a gender-specific term meaning ‘older brother’) is commonly used as a form of address for older siblings/ males, whilst kakak (a non-gender specific term meaning ‘older sibling’ is often used to mean ‘older sister’.More direct influences occur from dialects used in Javanese and Chinese languages which have seen further use of other gendered words in Indonesian. For example: Mas (Javanese language. = older brother), M'bak (Javanese language. = older sister), Koko (Chinese language = older brother) and Cici (Chinese= older sister).

Measure words

Another distinguishing well known feature of Indonesian language is its use of measure words.