🇲🇾 → 🇮🇩

How easy is Indonesian for Malay speakers?

Going from Malay to Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) has a composite linguistic distance of 9% (curated lexical data). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.

9% distance FSI Cat II — ~900 hours
Lexical similarity
90%

Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.

Grammatical distance
100%

Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.

Phonological similarity
100%

Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.

Writing-system match
40%

Latin/Arabic → Latin

Genealogical kinship
100%

Austronesian ↔ Austronesian

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Other easy languages for Malay speakers

The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from Malay:

Think you can tell them apart?

A quick 3-question check between Malay and Indonesian. No signup.