Indonesia Culture & Language

Indonesian culture is regional first and national second, and the national layer is a twentieth-century construction that has worked better than anyone expected.

Batik

Wax-resist dyeing practised across Java with motifs that carry meaning — certain patterns were once reserved for the courts of Yogyakarta and Solo. It is UNESCO-listed, worn formally on Fridays across the country, and the difference between hand-drawn batik tulis and printed imitation is the difference between weeks and minutes of work.

Wayang and gamelan

Wayang kulit is shadow puppetry performed with leather figures behind a screen, running all night, with a single puppeteer voicing every character and cueing the orchestra. That orchestra is the gamelan: bronze gongs and metallophones tuned in scales that do not correspond to Western ones, and a body of music that fascinated Debussy and generations after him.

The kitchen

Rice is the centre of almost every meal. Nasi goreng and satay travel; the more interesting cooking is regional — Padang food from west Sumatra, served by bringing every dish to the table and charging for what you touch; Balinese babi guling; Javanese sweetness; Manadonese heat.

Ceremony in Bali and Toraja

Balinese Hinduism organises the year around temple anniversaries and produces daily woven offerings on every threshold. In Tana Toraja, funerals are the central social event, lasting days, costing years of savings, and followed by the periodic exhumation and re-dressing of the dead.

Textiles and craft

Ikat weaving from Flores, Sumba and Timor, silverwork in Bali and Yogyakarta, and the keris dagger, which is UNESCO-listed and treated as having a spirit of its own.

Bahasa Indonesia is the national language and one of the more successful pieces of nation-building anywhere. It was built from Malay, a trade lingua franca, rather than from Javanese, the language of the largest group — almost nobody spoke it natively and almost everybody could learn it, which is exactly why it worked.

It is also unusually easy: no tones, no verb conjugation, no grammatical gender, no plurals beyond repeating the word, and a Latin alphabet pronounced close to how it is written. A fortnight of effort produces real results.

Around seven hundred regional languages are spoken alongside it — Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, Minangkabau and many more — and most Indonesians are bilingual from childhood.

English is common in tourist areas, hotels and among younger urban people, and rare elsewhere. A few words help enormously: selamat pagi for good morning, terima kasih for thank you, berapa for how much, tidak for no, and enak for delicious.