The Little Prince in Indonesian…
The Indonesian archipelago is not only a crossroads where almost all the world’s great civilisations – Indian, Chinese, Islamic and Western – meet and mingle. It is also a particularly interesting region in which to depart from the orientalist’s approach and adopt that of the anthropologists, who generally focus their attention on the Pacific islands and the confines of Melanesia. Indonesian is the official language of the 200 million or so citizens of the Republic of Indonesia. The Malay spoken in Malaysia and the Malay spoken in the Sultanate of Brunei and Singapore are merely variants of a common language that has evolved along different lines according to the dictates of colonialism. These languages, which use Latin characters, have been influenced by Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese and European languages.