Last updated on May 1, 2022
The basic sentence in Indonesian is often said to consist of a “topic” (the thing or person that is the beginning point for what you want to say) and the “comment” (the information or opinion you give about the topic). The comment may have a verb in it (like makan, duduk, tinggal etc.), but it may also be just a name, or a place, or a characteristic etc. In the latter case, the topic and comment simply stand side by side in the sentence. It is quite common for the comment to come first, followed by the topic. But usually the topic comes first, as it does in these sentences.
Ini Erna
This is Erna.
Saya Paulus.
I am Paulus.
Anda dari Arab Saudi?
You are from Saudi Arabia?
Notice that in the English translation of these sentences we must use the verb “to be” (is, am, are). In Indonesian there is no counterpart to the English verb “to be” in these kinds of sentences, so it is important for English-speaking learners to resist the temptation to fill what they may feel is a “gap” by inserting a word that represents “to be”.
Word order can be very different from that of English
Often the order of components in an Indonesian sentence is the same as the order of components in an English sentence. Compare these two sentences.
Saya tinggal di Jakarta I live in Jakarta
As we have already seen, prepositions (words like to, on, with, by, for etc.) come before a noun in Indonesian as they do in English.
ke gereja to church
dari sekolah from school
di pasar at the market
In questions, a question-word (like what, where, who etc.) may appear at the beginning of a sentence or clause as it usually does in English.
Siapa nama Anda? What is your name?
Apa kabar? How are you? (literally: What news?)
Apa kamu suka pisang? Do you like bananas?
But it is very important not to get lulled into a false sense of security here. Very often word order in Indonesian is different – radically different – from that of English. For example a question-word may appear at the end of a sentence or clause in Indonesian. You have already seen a couple of examples of this.
Mau ke mana? Where are you going?
Anda berasal dari mana? Where do you come from?
Noun phrases may also have a word order different from that of English noun phrases. A noun phrase is an “expansion” of a noun. For example, the noun “house” can be expanded to produced noun phrases like “my house”, “a big house”, “my very big house” etc. In these kinds of phrases the word “house” is called the headword, and the other components of the phrase are the adjunct. As you can see, in English the adjunct comes before the headword. But in Indonesian the opposite may be the case – the headword may come first and the adjunct follow. This applies in noun phrases that express possession. Compare these phrases.
nama Anda your name
toko Anda your shop
gedung saya my building
kantor saya my office
sekolah John John’s school
rumah Bu Nur Mrs Nur’s house
When you are talking about possession in Indonesian it is very important to get word order correct. If you want to say, for example, “your factory” and you transfer English word order into Indonesian, you will produce the incorrect phrase *Anda pabrik, literally “you are a factory”!