Indonesian vs Malaysian

Are Malay and Indonesian the same language?

Let me begin this blog with a few observations about the English language. One day, I was speaking with my students at the University of Hawaiʻi when they started complaining about another professor in our department. “We know he speaks English,” they said, “but we simply cannot understand him!” He happened to be from New Zealand.

A similar thing happened to me while driving through rural Scotland. I got lost and asked for directions to Edinburgh. The locals kindly explained how to get there—I assume—but I couldn’t understand a single word. Clearly, even native speakers of English do not necessarily understand each other!

Once, I supervised two teaching assistants, one from Malaysia and one from Indonesia. One day, I noticed they were speaking English to each other.

“Why English?” I asked.

They replied, “Because we can’t understand each other.”

So I proposed a test: “Let’s see if you really can’t communicate. The only condition is that you must use formal Indonesian and formal Malaysian. No Melaka Malay, no Jakarta slang.”

And—voilà—they understood each other perfectly. Sure, there are differences in vocabulary (just like how British people call trucks ‘lorries’), but overall, the two languages are remarkably similar.

Here is a video I recommend that highlights some of the differences between Indonesian and Malay:

A few remarks:

Yes, bisa in Malaysian only means ‘venom’. Malays use boleh to express both ‘can’ and ‘may’, but they are so accustomed to Indonesian music and films that they will still understand you. Bisa is, in fact, a loan word from Javanese.

Bandara is actually formed from the words bandar (port) and udara (air). The term lapangan terbang is universally understood in Indonesian, although it sounds rather old fashioned. In Malaysia, cities are referred to either as kota, as in Indonesian, or bandar, which literally means ‘port’, reflecting the maritime traditions of Malay society, which tended to settle where ships could dock.

Apotek is borrowed from Dutch.

Rumah Sakit is a direct, literal translation of the Dutch ziekenhuis.

In Indonesian, pusing also means ‘to spin’. While a headache is sakit kepala, you can say saya pusing kepala, literally ‘my head is spinning’, or simply pusing to indicate dizziness.

Pengacara in Indonesian means ‘lawyer’, whereas a ‘presenter’ is called pembawa acara, very similar to the Malaysian use of pengacara.