Best of the Best (Crème de la Crème)

            Alfred Russel Wallace, page 20 in Malay Archipelago (his great travel book about the six years he spent traveling through the Dutch East Indies in the mid 1800s) writes: "the inhabitants of Malaka established a peculiar language drawn from the most elegant modes of speaking of other nations, so that in fact the language of the Malays is the most refined, exact and celebrated of all the East. Their language is in vogue through the Indies."

            Jan Huyghen van Linschoten in his Itinerario, reports a local tradition of the Malays of Malacca according to which the beginnings of the city dated back "only a few years" before his time (1575 to 1600 AD). "The place originated in the gathering of fishermen of all nations at that particular spot, where they decided to build a town and to develop their own language, taking the best words from all languages of the neighborhood. The town of Malacca, because of its favorable situation, became the principal port of southeastern Asia, its language called the Malay came to be considered the most polite and fittest of all languages of the Far East."

            Modern Indonesian is derived from a literary dialect of Old Malay, which was the lingua franca of Southeast Asia. The big split happened in 1901 when Indonesia adopted the Van Ophuysen orthography. Malaysia adopted the Wilkinson orthography in 1904.

 

Indo Intl.

            After working closely with both languages for the last 10 years, it is the author's personal opinion that bahasa Indonesia is more suitable than English to be the world's International Language. Bahasa Indonesia is easy to learn and still has logical root word families. There is a simplicity and consistency in bahasa Indonesia that seems lacking in English.