Most native speakers of Indonesian would agree that the
standard, correct version of the Indonesian language is r
arely used in daily communication. One can find standard and correct Indonesian in books and newspapers, or listen to it when watching the news or television/radio broadcasts, but few native Indonesian speakers use formally correct language in their daily conversations. While this is a phenomenon common to most languages in the world (for example, spoken English does not always correspond to written standards), the degree of "correctness" of spoken Indonesian (in terms of grammar and vocabulary) by comparison to its written form is noticeably low. This is mostly due to the fact that most Indonesians tend to combine certain aspects of their own local languages (eg.
Javanese,
Sundanese,
Balinese, and even
Chinese dialects, particularly
Hokkien) with Indonesian. The result is the creation of various types of 'regional' Indonesian, the very types that a foreigner is most likely to hear upon arriving in any Indonesian city or town. This phenomenon is exacerbated by the use of
Indonesian slang, particularly in the cities. A classic example of a speaker of accented Indonesian is former president
Soeharto, whose Javanese accent came through whenever he delivered a speech.