The Second Version

30/04/11

How They Speak Here

Indonesian language belongs to the Austronesian family, so it is"_blank" as far as it can be from Indo-european languages, despite the large number of words borrowed from Dutch.

One of the most glaring differences if that Indonesian has no gender. While European languages have at least masculine and feminine, and sometimes also neutral, Indonesian has none of the above.

Nouns are all... well, genderless, but there are specific words for male and female persons, such as:

putri (daughter)
putra (son)

cewek (girl, woman in general)*
cowok (boy, man in general)

There are more along these lines, but these are among the most common. How is speaking a language so different? Not so difficult for me in fact; my vocabulary is still limited but I have grasped grammar and syntax well enough already.

* These two words are rather informal; the correct ones would be perampuan and laki.

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