Many kinds of border whether physical or mental borders divide people from one another. Language is one kind of barrier that makes people do not understand each other. Many places have their own traditional languages with their own accent. But most of those language can be easily understood because the sentence structures are more likely the same to one another. This language barrier and language structure comparison from Jakarta and Berlin is what I want to emphasize in this blog post.
In Indonesia, there are a lot of different languages spoken in every area, every island, and every tribe. However, there is one official language to unify the myriad languages in Indonesia, which is Bahasa Indonesia. Jakarta, as the capital city of Indonesia, is home of people from vast different ethnicity. A lot of people from Borneo, Sumatra, Papua, and Java islands move from their home island to Jakarta in order to take their chances to succeed. Therefore, although they understand Bahasa Indonesia, their accent are so thick that some other people might not understand what they say or misinterpret the point. From my experience, I do have East Java accent growing up. One time I met someone who is not from East Java, sometimes they said that I am kinda rude towards them, but that is just my accent. However, mostly other people just chuckle on me because they can easily identify where I came from.
In Berlin, East German people have some differences in their accent and their dictionaries than West German people. People who raised in East Germans were taught high German dialect to embellish their identity as East Germans and they still carried that accent till this day. They also have some objects’ name altered in order to avoid similarity from the Western culture. For instance, according to Oxford dictionary blog, people from West German call a convenience store “supermarkt” supermarket, while East Germans call it “Konsum” cooperative shop.
Sometimes, in Indonesia when a person talk to another people from different ethnicity, they can understand what they are saying as long as they do not speak different vocabularies. The main reason is the sentence structure is easy to understand. In their sentences they only put in subject, verb, objects, and description of place or time. The vocabularies do not have alteration whether they are past, present, or future tenses. People can differs those tenses just by listening to the description of time. Similarly, German people also understand other German with different dialect based on their mother language. However, the sentence structure in German language is not what I am familiar with because it adds words or alters the vocabulary when saying in different tenses, as “haben” or “sein” can be added in perfect tense.
In conclusion, Indonesian people and German people have different accents based on where they came from. People from different islands or regions in Indonesia speak differently with their dialects, and the same goes with people who raised in East Germany or West Germany. However, some words for German people are altered because of the past teaching. In sense of sentence structure, Indonesian language does not alter any vocabulary based on the tenses, while German languages does alter and add extra words based on the tenses.
Citation:
” The Future Tense (das Futur).” The Future Tense (das Futur). N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2016.
@OxfordWords. “Do East and West Germans Still Speak a Different Language? | OxfordWords Blog.” OxfordWords Blog. N.p., 26 Feb. 2016. Web. 10 Nov. 2016.