Expansion of Austronesians fom Taiwan
Indonesian belongs to the Austronesian language family, while English is part of the Indo-European language group. These two language families come from completely different origins and have very little in common—except for loanwords, words that languages borrow from each other.
For example, the Indonesian word polisi comes from the Dutch politie. And sometimes the borrowing goes the other way around. Languages constantly exchange words, especially through trade, colonization, and cultural contact. These borrowed words act like little bridges between otherwise unrelated languages.
Language Families: Why Some Languages Sound Similar
That English, Dutch, and German are related is easy to see. Just compare English ‘house’ with German Haus and Dutch huis. They look and sound similar because they come from the same root.
English, German, and Dutch belong to the Germanic language family. French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian belong to the Romance family. But both Germanic and Romance languages are part of a much bigger group called Indo-European.
Besides Germanic and Romance, Indo-European also includes Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Hellenic (Greek), and Indo-Iranian. All these families come from one ancient ancestor language, which is why they still share many cognates—words with the same origin.
Examples of cognates include:
English father, German Vater, Italian padre, Persian pedar, and Hindi pitā.
Ketchup: Why Loanwords Are Not Cognates
English is Indo-European, Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family, and Malay-Indonesian is Austronesian. These three language groups are not related—but they still share some loanwords.
English words like coolie and tycoon come from Chinese. Another famous example is ketchup—and its story is surprisingly complex.
The English word ‘ketchup’ did not come directly from Chinese. It came via Malay. The Malay word kecap itself was borrowed from Hokkien Chinese kê-tsiap.
Here’s the twist:
• In Hokkien, kê-tsiap originally referred to a kind of fish sauce.
• In Malay, kecap means soy sauce.
• In English, ‘ketchup’ became the familiar spiced tomato sauce.
So the same borrowed word ended up naming three different condiments in three different languages. This shows an important point: loanwords and cognates can be related, but their meanings can change a lot over time.
Austronesian: One of the World’s Biggest Language Families
Austronesian languages are spoken by about 386 million people—roughly 5% of the world’s population—in more than a dozen countries. That makes Austronesian the fifth-largest language family in the world by number of speakers.
No one knows the exact number of Austronesian languages, because it’s often hard to decide where a “language” ends and a “dialect” begins. Some estimates say there are more than 1,000 Austronesian languages, and most of them are found in Indonesia.
Among all of them, Indonesian (bahasa Indonesia) and its close relative Malaysian (bahasa Malaysia) are by far the most widely used, with more than 200 million speakers combined.
All Austronesian languages ultimately go back to the Formosan languages spoken by the indigenous peoples of Taiwan. From there, Austronesian-speaking peoples began one of the greatest migration stories in human history.
They first moved from Taiwan to the Philippines, then to Indonesia, then onward to Malaysia, Polynesia (including Hawaii and New Zealand), and even as far as Madagascar off the coast of Africa. Because of this shared origin, people across this huge area not only share related languages, but also parts of the same ancestral gene pool.
As the above map shows (click on the map to enlarge it), the first Austronesian speakers left Taiwan around 3000 BC. It took them roughly 4,000 years to spread across the vast area between Madagascar and Easter Island.
How Similar Is Indonesian to Other Austronesian Languages?
Malay—both Indonesian and Malaysian—shares many similarities with Austronesian languages spoken thousands of kilometers away, such as Malagasy in Madagascar or Maori in New Zealand. Since East Timor is surrounded by Indonesia, it’s also no surprise that Tetum, the national language of Timor-Leste, has many similarities with Malay-Indonesian.
Here are a few examples:
| English | Malay | Tagalog | Malagasy | Javanese | Tetum | Maori | Hawaiian |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| eye | mata | mata | manta | mata | matan | mata | maka |
| two | dua | dalawa | rua | loro | rua | rua | lua |
| sky | langit | langit | lanitra | langit | lalean | rangi | lani |
| fish | ikan | isda | trondro | iwak | ikan | ika | iha |
| stone | batu | bato | vato | watu | fatuk | kohatu | haku |
| fire | api | apóy | àfo | apuy | ahi | ahi | ahi |
| mouth | mulut | bibig | váva | tutuk | ibun | waha | waha |
You might wonder why some words look very similar (like mata for “eye”), while others—like “mouth”—look completely different.
In fact, many Austronesian languages use words based on two old roots: bibih and baba, with variants such as bibig, vava, and waha. In many Indonesian regional languages, the word for “mouth” comes from one of these two roots.
For example, ‘mouth’ in Balinese it is bibih, and in Batak it is baba. Interestingly, bibih is related to the Indonesian word bibir, which means “lips”.
Uli Kozok (2023)