Last updated on March 31, 2022
Austronesian Languages
Indonesian or bahasa Indonesia, is an Austronesian language that has been used as a lingua franca in the multilingual Indonesian archipelago for centuries.
Austronesian languages, also known as Malayo-Polynesian, are a language family, widely spoken in most of the Indonesian archipelago; all of the Philippines, Madagascar, and the island groups of the Central and South Pacific (except for Australia and much of New Guinea); much of Malaysia; and scattered areas of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Taiwan. They are spoken by about 386 million people (4.9% of the world population). This makes it the fifth-largest language family by number of speakers.
Major Austronesian languages include Malay (Indonesian and Malaysian), Javanese, and Tagalog (Filipino). According to some estimates, the family contains 1,257 languages. Around 900 Austronesian languages are about equally divided among Indonesia (including the western half of the large island of New Guinea) and the Pacific islands of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia.
Lingua Franca
When representatives of the Dutch East India Company arrived in Indonesia at the beginning of the 17th century, they discovered that Malay served as a lingua franca in major ports throughout the archipelago; the language has retained that role to the present day. It was thus natural that Malay would be selected as the basis for the national language of Malaysia (Bahasa Malaysia), Brunei (Bahasa Kebangsaan ‘national language’), and Indonesia (Bahasa Indonesia).
SVO
Most languages of western Indonesia—such as Malay, Javanese, or Balinese—are SVO (Subject – Verb – Object). However, a smaller number of languages, including Malagasy, the Batak languages of northern Sumatra, and Old Javanese (as opposed to modern Javanese), begin sentences with a verb. The majority of Austronesian languages in both eastern Indonesia and the Pacific are also SVO.
Number Classifier
A number of the languages of Indonesia and the Pacific use number classifiers in counting objects, as with Bahasa Indonesia se-buah rumah ‘a house’ (literally, ‘one-fruit house’), se-orang guru ‘a teacher’ (literally, ‘one-person teacher’), or se-batang rokok ‘a cigarette’ (literally, ‘one-trunk cigarette’).
Reduplication
Reduplication takes numerous forms and has a great variety of functions in Austronesian languages. Full reduplication is used to mark plurality of nouns in Bahasa Indonesia, as with anak ‘child’ but anak anak ‘children.’ In many languages reduplication is used together with affixation to express a variety of semantic nuances. The pattern seen in Indonesian anak anak-an ‘doll’ or orang orang-an ‘scarecrow’ (orang ‘person’) is only one of many that occur in various languages.
Phonology
Vowel systems in Austronesian languages tend to be simple. Many languages in Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia have just four contrasting vowels: i, u, a, and e, an indistinct mid-central vowel.
Source: Britannica and Wikipedia