Interesting facts about the language

Malay belongs to the Austronesian language family. The Austronesian language family is native to areas from Madagascar to Easter Island and is considered one of the largest language families in the world. This is partly because it includes at least 500 individual languages. And secondly because, with around 200 million speakers, it is one of the largest families in terms of numbers. Malay is one of the four main languages in this family. Indonesian, Javanese, and Filipino are also widespread languages in this group, spoken by many people. The main characteristic of the Austronesian language group is that (due to the large number of individual languages) there is a colorful coexistence of many languages across the region. Many people speak other languages and dialects in addition to the national language of their home country, which they learned in school. Malay is the official language of Malaysia, Singapore, and the Sultanate of Brunei. Indonesian is closely related to Malay. Officially, Malay and Indonesian are treated as separate languages, but they are closer to each other than many German dialects. Thus, they are often treated as one language in linguistics. The differences between the two languages lie primarily in their different historical developments. During the colonial period, Bahasa Indonesia was influenced by the Dutch, and Bahasa Melayu by the British.

Malaysian is generally considered the 'Italian of the Orient'. Similar to Italian, Malaysian shares a large part of its vocabulary with other languages of the Austronesian language family. This is why it is considered relatively easy for speakers of this language family to learn it as a second language. But why should speakers whose native languages belong to other language families (and German certainly does) also find it easy to learn this language? On the one hand, this is due to the language's sound structure: Malaysian and Indonesian are easy for Europeans to pronounce. Germans have an even greater advantage than, for example, the French: to a certain extent, everything is pronounced the same way you would in German. In total, there are only five vowels (as in German: a, e, i, o, and u) and one additional so-called "mid-tongue vowel" [ə] – and you already know this from German. Learning and understanding the grammar is also relatively easy: Malay is an isolating language. In isolating languages, words always remain the same. Unlike in German, you don't have to learn verb inflection in this language course; nouns always remain the same, and adjectives are also regularly intensified and not adjusted to antecedents. There are no articles that need to be learned along with the noun. Pronouns are not declined.