Southeast Asia runs an hour ahead of the sun

The clock change that stuck

On 1 January 1982, Peninsular Malaysia moved its clocks forward by half an hour so that the whole country, including Sabah and Sarawak on Borneo, would share one time. Singapore followed on the same day. Both now sit on UTC+8, the same as Beijing and Perth, even though Kuala Lumpur and Singapore sit at almost the same longitude as Bangkok, which keeps UTC+7.

The result is that the sun runs late. On the March equinox it rises in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur after seven in the morning and sets after seven in the evening. Evenings feel long and light, and life is pushed later: a dinner at eight is not a late dinner here.

Approximate local sunrise times, rounded. The two cities whose clocks moved in 1982 stand out.

One country, three time zones

Indonesia stretches across more than seventeen thousand islands and about five thousand kilometres from west to east, roughly the width of the continental United States. It uses three time zones: Western Indonesia Time (UTC+7) for Sumatra, Java and western Borneo; Central (UTC+8) for Bali, Sulawesi and the rest of Borneo; and Eastern (UTC+9) for Maluku and Papua. When it is ten at night in Jakarta, it is already midnight in Jayapura.

It also has one of the most remarkable language stories anywhere. More than seven hundred languages are spoken in Indonesia, and in 1928 a youth congress declared that the shared language of the future nation would be Malay, renamed Indonesian. It was a trading language rather than the language of the largest ethnic group, which was Javanese, and that was precisely the point: choosing it favoured no one. Today almost everyone speaks Indonesian, and for most people it is a second language alongside a regional one.

The texting capital of the world

In the early 2000s the Philippines became famous as the "text capital of the world". Prepaid phones and cheap text messages meant Filipinos sent SMS in volumes few other countries matched, and texting became a culture of its own, with abbreviations, chain messages and greetings sent to everyone in a phone book. The habit carried straight into social media, where the Philippines regularly appears near the top of global rankings for time spent online each day.

Filipino conversation also code-switches constantly. Taglish, a fluid blend of Tagalog and English, is how a great many people talk to friends, and it is not slang: it is how bilingual people naturally speak. Politeness rides on small words too. Adding po to a sentence makes it respectful, and opo is a polite "yes".

Small words that do big work

Across the region, much of the warmth of a conversation is carried by short particles that do not translate neatly.

Two of the region's big languages are tonal, which matters if you are learning by speaking. Thai has five tones; northern Vietnamese has six. The same syllable said with a different pitch is a different word, which is why reading a phrasebook gets a learner only so far and talking to a real person gets them much further.

So if you meet someone from Kuala Lumpur at what feels like dusk, check the clock before you say good evening. Is it still daytime there?