++

They adopted Bahasa Indonesia mainly as a political tool in 1927 with the cry 'One Nation, One Country, One Language!' When the Japanese army occupied Indonesia from 1942-1945, they found it impossible to substitute their own language, so for purely political reasons they encouraged the use of Indonesian in native writing and art, and also in order to disseminate their propaganda over the islands. When the war ended, the proclammation of Independence was written and broadcast to the world in Indonesian. When Indonesia achieved nation-status in the 1950's, a modern version of the language was quickly developed and extended to apply to all the higher requirements of a fully modernizing, developing country - technical, abstract, literary, as well as serving all the needs of administration, law, scholarship and commerce.

Today Indonesian has grown more involved, polite, dynamic than the Malaysian language. In modern Indonesian literature Indonesian has served quite satisfactorily for the expression of Muslim (Karta Mihardja's Atheis, The Atheist, 1949), Christian (Sitor Situmorang's Si-nak Hilang, The Lost Son), and Hindu (I Gusti Njoman P. Tisna's I Swasta Setahun di Bedahulu, I Swasta's Year at Bedahulu, 1938) beliefs and feelings. In its history it has devoured thousands of words from Indonesia's local languages, as well as from Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Portugese, Sanskrit, Tamil, and English. A super-onomatopoetic language, Iayang-Iayang means 'kite' and cemplung means 'to drop into the water'. It is a poetic language: matahari means sun' or literally, 'the eye of the day', and it is picturesque: bunga uang means 'bank interest' (frombunga or 'flower' and uang or 'money')