Some critical concerns for adapting the Bilingual Aphasia Test to Bahasa Indonesia

Abstract

One of the most widely spoken languages of the world, Bahasa Indonesia (BI), became standardized as the official language of Indonesia. Based on Malay, it served as lingua franca in various forms throughout the Indonesian archipelago for centuries. Although BI has been habitually learned as a second language, the number of native speakers of BI continues to increase. As a member of the Western Austronesian branch of the Austronesian language family, its grammar and usage bear some resemblance to related languages such as Tagalog. At the same time, certain morphosyntactic and pragmatic characteristics of BI that distinguish it from other languages have been the subject of extensive research and deliberation. For these reasons, the clinical utility of adapting the Bilingual Aphasia Test (. The assessment of bilingual aphasia. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates) is as evident as it is essential.

• aphasia
• Bahasa Indonesia
• Bilingual Aphasia Test
• Malay
• Manado Malay
• Austronesian language family

Acknowledgements

The author is forever grateful to Djein Imbang, John Wolff and Gita Martohardjono. Without their stalwart support, wise mentorship and gracious generosity, the original research project in Manado, Indonesia, upon which this article is based could never have been accomplished. The completion of this project, including adaptation of the BAT to BI and its implementation with patients in Manado, Indonesia, was supported by the Department of Linguistics, the Southeast Asia Program and the Cognitive Studies Program of Cornell University, as well as the Consortium for the Teaching of Indonesian and Malay. The author also thanks two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on this article.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Notes

1. Note that referring to Standard Indonesian simply as ‘Bahasa’ is inappropriate. The term bahasa must be specified, as in ‘Bahasa Malaysia’ (Standard Malay) or ‘Bahasa Jawa’ (Javanese) or ‘Bahasa Inggris’ (English) and so on.

2. This descriptive article is not intended to commit to any particular hypothesis about the structure of passives and/or object-preposed expressions in BI. The precise syntactic roles of the arguments in (10) are open to consideration. See Chung (1976) among others for discussion of theoretical issues surrounding passives in BI.

3. The issue of whether preposed constructions such as (16) are considered to be fundamentally different from passive constructions such as (15), or rather another type of passive construction, is set aside here. See Chung (1976) among others for further discussion of the underlying representations of these constructions.