Indonesian and Malay

Way back in college, I was looking for exotic languages of interest. A brief glance at Sanskrit had convinced me that was not the way to go. Russian had lost its exoticism since I had Lithuanian roommates. And then I pulled from the shelves a little book, Teach Yourself Malay (an older edition, now out of print). Its opening words:

Malay is an easy language. Bafflingly easy. After ten weeks, you will think you know all there is to know. After ten years, you know you never will.

I'm quoting from memory, and perhaps imperfectly, but there's the gist: a language that's easy to start and impossible to finish. I was hooked by the idea, and took the book home. But then finals week came and Malay was dropped.

In the years since, I have remained fascinated by Malay, and by its sister language, Indonesian, a grown up and independent variant of Pesar Malay (Bazaar Malay - traders' jargon for people who didn't know Malay but spoke it anyway).

Malay and Indonesian are fun for their simplicity of grammar and expression, but they can be as frustrating to read as they are to try at speaking because while the beginning speaker can mumble imperfect phrases that still come to something, the native speaker has at his or her command varieties of expression a beginner will miss out on.

While Malay and Indonesian have a lot in common, they are not the same language. Whenever I am studying, I think I shall do Malay, first because of the Preface to Teach Yourself Malay and second because the resources for it seem to be clearer. But for reasons of practicality, I lean toward Indonesian: It is the second language of an enormous number of people in the most populous predominantly Muslim nation in the world. In reality, I will probably wind up speaking a hodge-podge of the two - not Bazaar Malay but a bizarre Malay that combines the simplified grammar of Indonesian and Malay vocabulary. My long term goals: Newspapers in either language and a shot at deciphering a few pantoum.