Indonesian (Indonesia) style guide

Use standard Indonesian for broad-audience product help and interfaces. A campaign may use a more informal register when its audience supports it. Follow the shared voice, mechanics and localization review guidance; this page covers local wording, grammar and typography.

Address and people

Use Anda, with a capital A, when addressing the reader explicitly. An instruction often needs no pronoun: Buka file is direct and concise. Do not switch casually between Anda and kamu within a product flow. Keep a chosen campaign register consistent.

Distinguish kami, which excludes the person addressed, from kita, which includes them. Use kami for a real action by the company or support team, not as decoration in every automatic message. Name the application or component when its identity matters. A missing file does not require a fictional team to say it cannot find it.

Dia does not distinguish he from she. Other words can still specify gender, a role or a relationship. Pegawai can describe an employee without choosing karyawan or karyawati; perawat need not specify a nurse's gender. Keep a person's self-description and a relevant relationship: orang tua does not preserve every distinction carried by ibu or ayah.

Do not treat nationalities, ethnic identities, disability terms or gender identities as interchangeable entries in a replacement list. Name people accurately and mention an attribute when it matters. Use the shared accessible-content guidance and the person's preferred description.

Meaning and terminology

Choose familiar, precise words: perlu, coba, ponsel where they carry the intended meaning. Short roots do not replace every inflected verb. Use the agreed term consistently; pembaruan names an update, while perbarui can instruct someone to update. Pemutakhiran is not inherently wrong simply because another term is preferred for a product.

An instruction rarely needs repeated silakan, mohon or tolong, but these words can express a meaningful request or courtesy. Do not delete them mechanically from a letter. Cara membuat file is a compact topic heading; Bagaimana cara membuat file? is a natural question with a different function.

Preserve the required interaction. Watching gestures and reproducing them are different tasks. Follow interface actions: pilih identifies a selection, while klik can specify a mouse action when needed. Do not make every instruction device-neutral at the cost of accuracy.

Keep actors, conditions, quantities and technical distinctions. In a DNS explanation, resolving a name is not simply “overcoming” an address problem. A feature that helps protect a device does not guarantee protection. Do not import a supplier's campaign claim, automatic-activation promise or availability statement into a new product.

Word formation and prepositions

Write the prepositions di, ke and dari separately: di folder, ke folder, dari folder. The passive prefix di- is attached to its verb: disimpan, dihapus. The sentence File disimpan di folder tujuan shows both constructions. Do not use search-and-replace to join every di or split every word beginning with it.

Use the Indonesian form appropriate to the sentence: ekspor can name an action, mengekspor can describe an actor performing it, and diekspor can describe what happens to an object. A compact label does not justify stripping affixes from explanatory prose. Check a disputed borrowed form against current spelling and terminology references.

Write ordinary compound elements separately unless the word has an established joined form. Keep kata sandi separate and matahari joined. Reduplication uses a hyphen, as in langkah-langkah. Hyphens can disambiguate some compounds, but do not invent English-like chains or add a hyphen to every multiword term.

Choose a preposition for the relationship: ke folder expresses a destination, dari folder an origin, and pada pukul 15.00 a time. Use kepada when the construction directs something to a person. Translate the full construction rather than assigning one Indonesian word to every English preposition.

Number, modifiers and ownership

A noun need not change merely because English makes it plural. 1 file, 2 file and 5 file can use the same form. Context, a number or a quantifier can already make plurality clear; do not mechanically reduplicate every plural noun. Para pengguna refers to people, not to files or every possible kind of object. Avoid adding para to a phrase already counted as dua pengguna.

Modifiers generally follow the noun: file baru, folder tujuan, buku Anda. Tas merah is a noun phrase meaning “red bag”; it is not by itself the full sentence “This is a red bag.” Use yang or a fuller clause when it clarifies the relation. Do not declare adjective order freely interchangeable if moving a modifier changes its scope.

Keep possession clear: file Anda and file mereka have different owners. A suffix such as -nya can depend on context; repeat a noun when a pronoun could refer to several objects or people. Do not add or remove ownership just to match English pronoun frequency.

Connect clauses naturally. Namun, can begin a contrasting sentence. A purpose clause with untuk is useful when it preserves the relationship, but agar and sehingga are not forbidden moods. Indonesian does not need a rule against an English split infinitive. Preserve whether the source states a purpose, a result, a condition or a possibility.

Capitalization and abbreviations

Use house sentence case for new interface labels and help headings: Simpan sebagai, Pilih semua, Opsi ekspor. This is an editorial choice for these surfaces. Exact existing labels, names and cited publication titles retain their capitalization; do not claim that Indonesian title conventions require every heading to use sentence case.

Capitalize Anda, names of languages and peoples, and names of days and months as required: bahasa Indonesia, Senin, September. A mid-sentence string does not gain a capital merely because its English source had one. Review the complete assembled message instead of capitalizing fragments in isolation.

Use established abbreviations such as dll., dsb., dst. and hlm. Do not remove arbitrary vowels to make a button fit. Initial-letter abbreviations such as PBB use capitals without periods; other acronym types differ. Bappenas has an initial capital, while pemilu is lowercase. Not every acronym is all caps. Explain a technical abbreviation when its expansion helps the reader.

Unit and currency symbols such as mm, kg and Rp take no abbreviation period. Preserve their exact case. An abbreviation such as dll. has no internal space to replace with a nonbreaking one. Keep approved product names and identifiers intact rather than abbreviating them ad hoc.

Messages and variables

Choose the wording for the actual state:

Function	Example
Action label	Simpan file
Instruction	Simpan file.
In progress	Sedang menyimpan file.
Completed	File telah disimpan.
Failed attempt	Gagal menyimpan file.
Current impossibility	Tidak dapat menyimpan file.

A noun such as Penyimpanan can name an operation, but does not by itself establish that the operation is running. Preserve progress, completion and failure with context or explicit wording. File tidak tersedia reports unavailability; it does not prove that someone deleted the file. Give a cause or recovery action only when it is known.

Keep everyone affected in a warning: Jika Anda memulai ulang komputer sekarang, Anda dan orang lain yang menggunakan komputer ini dapat kehilangan pekerjaan yang belum disimpan. The possibility of loss must not become a certain deletion. Lanjutkan? can be a compact question when the operation is clear; add context when the reader would otherwise have to guess. Follow interface feedback.

Check all placeholder values. Tidak dapat membuka file {name}. is suitable for a filename, not automatically for a person or a list. Preserve tokens, format specifiers, escapes and markup; reorder only when the parser supports it. Test counts in complete messages even when the noun stays unchanged: zero, singular, plural and fractional values can change what the sentence means. Follow messages and variables.

Punctuation, numbers and line breaks

Separate items in a series, including before its last conjunction: file, folder, dan templat. A preceding subordinate clause takes a comma: Jika file terbuka, tutup file itu. Do not insert the same comma mechanically when the main clause comes first. A colon can introduce a complete statement's list, but should not separate a verb from its object or break an unfinished construction.

Use “…” for quotations and ‘…’ for a quotation within one. A question mark belonging to quoted speech stays inside the quotation. Put no spaces just inside parentheses. Follow the shared mechanics for interface labels rather than surrounding every button name with quotation marks.

Use a decimal comma and a period for ordinary digit grouping: 1.526,75. A rupiah amount can be Rp12.500,00, with no period after Rp and no space before the number. Do not apply a generic currency-space rule to this form. Identify a foreign currency clearly and preserve its value; formatting is not currency conversion.

Separate a unit from its value with a nonbreaking space: 12,5 mm, −18 °C. The minus is U+2212, with no space before the digits; it is not a range dash or a raised zero. Keep a section label with its number where helpful: Bab 3. Use nonbreaking spaces where they prevent an unwanted break, not throughout every abbreviation or heading.

Use … for an ellipsis in prose and retain exact punctuation in existing controls. A range such as langkah 3–6 uses a dash. Keep version strings, code and input formats literal, including 1.2.0 when periods are required. Preserve an actual multiplication sign in dimensional prose: 5 × 7,2 inci; do not silently change inches to centimetres.

Keyboard wording and speech

Name the key used by the target product and keyboard: Ctrl, Alt, panah kiri. Preserve a platform distinction such as Command versus Ctrl and explain a numeric-keypad distinction when necessary. Access keys and shortcut combinations have different functions. Verify focus order, supported characters and collisions in the running interface; an inherited platform catalog cannot establish them.

For narration, use natural Indonesian pronunciation and an approved reading of names. Spell an unfamiliar abbreviation when useful. Read every character needed to reproduce a URL, version or command, including meaningful dots and slashes. Follow the shared audiovisual guidance for captions, pacing and essential visual information.