Indonesian/Lessons/Bahasa Oke

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Bahasa Okezone
Unbeknownst even to many native Indonesian speakers these days there is a subset of the Indonesian language derived from a peculiar form of a language game popular in the 1980s and often still used today.

The words you will learn in the following lesson are most definitely encompassed within what is known as Bahasa Prokem (itself a Bahasa Oke word as you will see below) and as such should probably not be used in polite company.

Language games and gibberish in Indonesian
Like English, Indonesian has its own Pig Latins and Ubbi-Dubbis, such as "Bahasa G." Similarly, these language games are used code a message for specific parties in a crowd and are usually rarely used out of the schoolyard. A notable exception is "Bahasa Oke" and the words which have endured are the sorts of words that speakers would not want authority figures to understand.

How it works
To create a Bahasa Oke word the rules are by no means hard and fast, the rules are bent to create words which have more of a ring to them, but in general the following rules are applied. One takes the first syllable of a normal Indonesian word and replaces the vowel with oke, oka or oki. Usually the 'e', 'a' or 'i' is chosen to be the same vowel replaced but that is not always the case.

Now, let's get to the examples.

This is far from a complete list of Bahasa Oke words but should help you on your way to gaining a more sophisticated understanding of the language of contemporary Jakarta.