Polyglottin'

Aye. English is seared into my mind, likely from my older siblings growing up abroad a bit before we went home, which lead to them speaking it around me and an abundance of English media in our household, which lead to me hanging around the Anglophone internet, which lead to English being the default setting of my internal monologue. Motherfuckers colonized my brain.

Mine's largely American-based. Though, as expected when you learn through media, also a potpourri of different varieties. Here are some random features:

• Cot-caught merger: "lot" /lɑt/ and "thought" /θɑt/ rhyme
• No weak vowel merger: "rabbit" /ræbɪt/ and "abbot" /æbət/ do not rhyme
• -ary pronounced /ri/: as in "dictionary" /dɪkʃənri/ and "military" /mɪlɪtɹi/, because I like it. It's a conscious decision.
• "News" pronounced /njuːz/

Bahasa ibu! My native language!

The Malayic languages originate from the island of Kalimantan, and spread out westwards to Sumatera and the Malay peninsula. Point is, it's technically not native to Java, where I'm at. It has, however, been a trade language of a huge area — the whole western-ish half of modern Indonesia and parts of what is now the Philippines, being the language of some powerful states, and ended up as our national language instead of the majority Javanese.

Some general features of Malay include moderate affixation

The variety I speak everyday is a form of Jakarta Indonesian. It's got influence from all various sorts of cultures, as you might expect from a big city. You have words from Arabic, Chinese, Javanese, etc. Check out this sentence I made where literally every morpheme is all Jakarta'd up:

• "Gua" comes from the Hokkien "" (, I; me). It's a colloquial 1st person pronoun, can be considered inappropriate in formal situations.
• "Kagak"
• "Nge-" is a form of the verbal prefix "meng-"
• "Liat" is a pronunciation spelling of the standard "lihat".
• "Bokap" is from a very local phenomenon, "prokem", which was originally criminal speak. The exact process used to make this word was you take the first syllable of the standard "bapak", then add the infix -ok- after the initial consonant.
  Other examples include "gokil" for "gila" (crazy) and "boker" for "berak" (to take a shit). "Prokem" itself is from "preman" (gangster).

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*from Dutch koelkast, literally "cool chest"

My first foray into language learning, before I even got into linguistics. One summer's day in 2018, I decided I'd do something new, not thinking too much about it, and so I signed up for Duolingo, and chose Japanese for no real reason. Learning this language has now been a part of my life ever since

Japanese is quite the language to start with for a speaker of English and Indonesian.

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The majority language of this part of Indonesia, and my father's first language. He sadly never spoke it to me, not that he had much of a reason to (my mom only speaks Malay).

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Ono jasad nang jero kulkas

Hey, that's no natlang! Toki Pona is actually a constructed language, created by Sonja Lang, and I learned it around the time I got into linguistics itself.

The quick premise of Toki Pona is pretty much "how simple of a language could you make"; it's got no more than 120 core words and

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