Indonesia and Malaysia - Boom Region in Southeast Asia
Malaysia is a country with 26 million inhabitants in between the Indian and the Pacific Oceans. In the year 2006, the country was able to attain exceptional economic growth of 5.7%. The per capita gross national product is at 5,457 US dollars and is therefore the highest in the region. Malaysia forms a linguistic community with its largest neighbour Indonesia. With 240 million inhabitants, Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world.
Up to the beginning of their colonisation, Malaysia and Indonesia were a cultural unit with a single language. In the wake of the colonial period, English is spoken today as a second language in Malaysia, Dutch on the other hand in Indonesia. This has also had an effect on the inhabitants' original language which has evolved in two separate directions.
The Differences Between a Malaysian and an Indonesian Translation
Most differences occur in respect of technical terms. Every word that describes things that did not yet exist prior to the colonial period is in the Malaysian almost always borrowed from the English and in the Indonesian mostly from the Dutch. Meanwhile, there is an additional influence via expressions from the Javanese and other regional languages, which further reinforces the drifting apart of the Malaysian and the Indonesian. While Indonesians and Malaysians could still make themselves understood to one another during the colonial period with hardly a problem, the ability to do so is very limited among the young Indonesians and Malaysians of today.
In Singapore <b/>more people speak English than Malaysian because there are more Chinese in the country than Malaysians. Here, an English translation is absolutely sufficient. Indeed, in Malaysia the roughly 26% of Chinese and the roughly 9% of Indians prefer to speak English too, but here Malaysian is the colloquial language of the majority and the sole official language. English is much less widespread in Indonesia. Here, Indonesian is the popular lingua franca which is indeed a foreign language for the majority, but is mastered by everyone nevertheless.
