# Prokem, bahasa gaul, language inventiveness


![ Pasar Senen by night](/blog/images/2008-02-17-prokem-bahasa-gaul-language-inventiveness_-_whole-01.png)
One of the problems I had when learning Indonesian in Jakarta was that what
people actually spoke seemed to be very distinct from what was in my
textbooks (never mind that my textbooks were also about 20 years old,
but most importantly they taught a very refined Indonesian. I remember
on the title page was the admonition: *“Bicara bahasa Indonesia yang
baik dan benar”*, speak correct Indonesian). I eventually realized that
what the young people in the office were speaking was called “bahasa
gaul”, a kind of youth slang that was both grammatically and
morphologically quite different (although mostly in consistent ways)
with standard Indonesian. Apparently it was related both to Betawi - the
dialect of the “original” Jakartans (Jakarta being a melting pot of all
ethnicities from the archipelago), Chinese - especially Hokkien words,
and probably vocabulary both from prison/drug environments, and gay and
transvestite culture.

This sociolect is of course in constant development - it might have
started as something very local to a small group in Jakarta and other
big cities, and then spread through the opening up of TV and radio, and
later to be used in youth novels to make them more “realistic” (which
meant that I could not at all understand the direct speech, and
sometimes the entire contents, of youth novels until late in my language
learning process). Now it is also being adopted by advertising posters
and traditional media as “cool”. And interestingly almost all blogs and
mailing lists are written in this style - which does not have a
standardized spelling, making it hard sometimes to google for things.

There are several elements, and I won’t try to give a full account.
There are lot’s of words that might come from Hokkien, Javanese or
Sundanese or other local languages, English or Dutch (but often with a
different, related meaning), or Indonesian that is transformed. For
example *cewek* and *cowok* for girl (Bhs Indo: *perempuan* and
*laki-laki*), *nyokap* and *bokap* for mum and dad (Bhs Indo: *ibu* and
*bapak* - which are also used as honorifics). Then there is the
different “conjugations”, where for example the suffix *-kan*, used to
make a verb transitive, becomes *-in*, and the initial *meng/men/meny*
(depending on the following letter), also a prefix for transitive verbs,
become *ng-, ny-.* So *mengapakan* (the transitive form of “what” = “what
are you doing”) becomes *ngapain* (a common question - what’s up?).

I also noticed that Indonesians seemed to have a very playful
relationship with their language, and love to create new words - very
often based by syllable abbreviations (that remind me of Russian
*komsomol* style abbreviations). I don’t know how far back in time this
goes, but it is not at all confined to slang - the department of
education has *Depdiknas* written with large letters on its building
(*Departemen Pendidikan Nasional*) - a good example of how
it seems quite random which syllables are chosen. (My boss in Jakarta
complained about *gakin*- *keluar**ga** mis**kin*** - poor families).
But this is also used a lot in youth cultures (and not just adolescent -
people I worked with at the office delighted in making up new ones, and
using them).

All this to say that I just came across a very interesting article about
*bahasa prokem* (apparently *prokem* is derived from *preman* - the
small crooks that control territories in Jakarta and demand protection
money, etc - a word derived from the Dutch *vrijman*), a kind of
precursor to the current *bahasa gaul* (*gaul* means something like
social, mixing - has connotations with naughty, and the term *pergaulan
bebas* which means free sex) from around the 1980s. He gives lot’s of
examples, and although most of it is much more radical than what I have
been hearing (although it might still live on in parts of the population
that I have not frequented), it’s fun to see the origins of some words
that are now largely accepted parts of casual speech, like *bokap* and
*nyokap*.

[“Those who speak
Prokem”,](http://e-publishing.library.cornell.edu/DPubS?service=UI&version=1.0&verb=Display&handle=seap.indo/1107019146)
by Henri Chambert-Loir.

*PS: This blog post is also an example of the power of open access
publishing - I would not have bothered blogging about this article, if
it had not been available for free download, since presumably most
readers either a) don’t have access to institutional article databases,
and b) even if they had, wouldn’t bother searching up this article, but
want a direct link.*

*PPS: I took the picture at night in __Pasar Senen__, which certainly has
enough __preman__ and __anak2 nongkrong__.*