A language of many speakers
Moch. N. Kurniawan, The Jakarta Post/Manila
A Filipino journalist Marian Trinidad was surprized when her classmate, a Malaysian Indian, Derrick V, spoke with Indonesian Edi Utama, not in English but in Malay/Indonesian.
"It was quite amazing for me to see an Indian guy understanding an Indonesian guy, in Bahasa (Indonesia)," Marian told her two classmates.
"Our language, Bahasa Indonesia comes from the same roots as Bahasa Melayu (Malay)," Edi told her.
Marian was even more surprised after realizing that her language, Tagalog, also had words in common.
Words like kanan (right), mata (eyes), payong (umbrella), pinto (door) are identical or similar to Indonesian words.
Indonesian comes directly from the language of the Malays, Bahasa Melayu, an Austronesian or Malayo-Polynesian language that has been lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries.
The nation's founding fathers realized that Malay, now the national language of Malaysia, was widely spoken across the archipelago and could play a crucial role in uniting the many ethnic groups here if it became a national language.
In the build-up to independence, the National Youth Congress in October 1928 declared Malay just that. However, it was not some time until after Indonesia declared independence in 1945 that the Indonesian form of Malay started to be taught in schools.
Indonesian in many practical terms is almost the same as Malay, however there are some marked differences in vocabulary and pronunciation that have resulted from the Dutch and Javanese influences on the language.
Some 200 million people speak Indonesian, with the number estimated to increase to about 300 million if Malay is included.
The languages are spoken by people living in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, East Timor, and in southern Thailand and the Philippines.
In comparison, around 1.3 billion people speak seven Chinese dialects; 750 million people speak English and some 500 million people speak Hindi.
Language expert Alwi Hasan in his conference paper in 1995 said Indonesian as a foreign language was taught in at least 29 countries, including Australia, the United States and Britain, and also in other countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Many linguists say the language with its lack of verb-tenses, prepositions and its simple structure is a comparatively easy language to learn, with people being able to master basic conversations after a few weeks of study. However, regional dialects, slang and the mixing in of other languages like Javanese, Sundanese and Batak, make it often hard for foreign learners to understand what they hear.