The core vocabulary of Indonesian is Austronesian, but the language has also borrowed innumerable commonly used words from Sanskrit, Arabic, Dutch, English and local languages, especially from Javanese and Jakartan Malay. It is sometimes described as “agglutinative”, meaning that it has a complex range of prefixes and suffixes which are attached to base words just as, for example, the English word “uncomfortable” is built up from the base word “comfort”. As far as pronunciation goes, Indonesian, though far from easy, is relatively straightforward for English speakers. Unlike Chinese, Indonesian is not a tonal language. The phrase “to run amock” comes from the Indonesian verb amuk (to run out of control killing people indiscriminately). Some Indonesian words have been borrowed into English, among them the common words gong, orangoutang and sarong, and the less common words paddy, sago and kapok. Other languages in this family include Malagasy (spoken on Madagascar off the coast of Africa), Javanese (famous for its extraordinarily elaborate system of honorific speech levels), Balinese (the language of the beautiful Hindu island of Bali), Tagalog or Filipino (the national language of the Philippines), and Maori (the language of the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand). Indonesian belongs to the Austronesian language family which extends across the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Nor is it related to the inland languages of New Guinea, the Aboriginal languages of Australia or the Sino-Tibetan languages of China and continental Southeast Asia. Indonesian is not related, even remotely, to English. In English we call the language “Indonesian”: it is not correct to call it simply “Bahasa”. Its name was changed to Bahasa Indonesia, literally: “the language ( bahasa) of Indonesia”. In 1928 the Indonesian nationalist movement chose it as the future nation’s national language. Malay is just one of many scores, perhaps hundreds, of different languages in the area now occupied by the Republic of Indonesia. It is understood in parts of the Sulu area of the southern Philippines and traces of it are to be found among people of Malay descent in Sri Lanka, South Africa and other places. It is also an important vernacular in the southern provinces of Thailand, in East Timor and among the Malay people of Australia’s Cocos Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean. With dialect variations it is spoken by more than 200 million people in the modern states of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei. Depending on how you define a language and how you count its number of speakers, today Malay-Indonesian ranks around sixth or seventh in size among the world’s languages. Indonesian is a 20th century name for Malay. Bahasa Indonesia: The Indonesian Language
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