This impressive book is the result of decades of meticulous scholarly work by various specialists with an intimate knowledge of Indonesian, Malay and the foreign languages that provided so many loan-words for Indonesian and Malay. For about 20,000 words the original donor language is given, such us Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch and English. For all lovers or Indonesian and Malay this book is essential reading that will continue to amaze and enrich you. Loan-words in Indonesian and Malay contains a tremendous wealth of information and is admirable as a consolidated reference work compiled with great precision, and indispensable for anyone interested in the subject.

This book should be of immense interest to students of language in general. Whether they are studying the Malay language in change or researching on the relationship between language and cognition or indeed delving into aspects of historical and anthropological linguistics, this book promises to offer many valuable insights. Throughout the hook, there is an attempt to relate linguistic theory to the pragmatics of language development.

This book is the first work to address the question of what kinds of words get borrowed in a systematic and comparative perspective. It studies lexical borrowing behavior on the basis of a world-wide sample of 40 languages, both major languages and minor languages, and both languages with heavy borrowing and languages with little lexical influence from other languages. The book is the result of a five-year project bringing together a unique group of specialists of many different languages and areas. The introductory chapters provide a general up-to-date introduction to language contact at the word level, as well as a presentation of the project's methodology. All the chapters are based on samples of 1000-2000 words, elicited by a uniform meaning list of 1460 meanings. The combined database, comprising over 70,000 words, is published online at the same time as the book is published. For each word, information about loanword status is given in the database, and the 40 case studies in the book describe the social and historical contact situations in detail. The final chapter draws general conclusions about what kinds of words tend to get borrowed, what kinds of word meanings are particularly resistant to borrowing, and what kinds of social contact situations lead to what kinds of borrowing situations.

Dictionary of Arabic Loanwords in the Languages of Central and East Africa analyzes around 3000 Arabic loanwords in more than 50 languages in the area, and completes the work started in a previous similar work on West Africa.