Bahasa means Language!

I just saw an infographic about native languages spoken around the world. It is a nice infographic.... until I saw what I don't like. Even though there is some data that to me doesn't seem to make sense, but I won't talk about it here. I don't know how they collect the data, so I can't judge whether it's correct or not.

But two things that I know for sure are wrong. There is no language called "Telegu" nor "Bahasa". I mean OK, people make mistakes, the creator surely doesn't speak any of these languages and they are probably not as famous as those other widely known languages. But this infographic is focusing on languages, surely the creator had made some research before. However I will now focus only on the word bahasa, a word from my mother-tongue.

I probably won't get so annoyed like this if this is only a mistake made on this single infographic. My fury began actually long...long...long time ago, when I was still a teenager. There was this foreign guy who lived in Indonesia, he spoke on TV and he mentioned about speaking "Bahasa". What he meant was actually "Bahasa Indonesia". Since the word bahasa means language in English. The way our people say it is, when translated into English, "I speak Indonesian language". So, unlike the usually shorter way in English, "I speak Indonesian", we always use the word "language" (bahasa) together with name of the language itself. This is the common way of saying it in formal situations as well as in slang. So when you speak in English the proper way to say it is "I speak Indonesian", not "I speak Bahasa". And when you speak in Indonesian then it should be "saya berbicara Bahasa Indonesia" not "saya berbicara bahasa".

Since that guy is not a native speaker, his mistake was of course totally understandable. What made it so bizarre was, that the next couple of days later, one of our own officials (I think it was a minister in Soeharto's era) used the word bahasa exactly like the way the foreign guy did. I don't know if he was inspired by the foreigner or I was so old-fashioned that I didn't know the new way of using the word - but instead of giving a good example, the official decided to sound "cool" that day. You know, in those years, slang was not allowed on our television, not even on a soap-opera. But as far as I know, some Indonesian started to speak it this way since then. It really itches my whole body every time I hear it. When translated into English, it sounds: "I speak Language. My language is called Language. Do you speak my language, which is Language? How cool, you speak language Language!" How stupid does it sound?

No wonder foreign people say it wrongly. I can't be mad at them. But I really really do feel like spanking some Indonesian asses.