ABSTRACT
For speakers of European languages the Indonesian language is perhaps among the easiest to read and write. There are several reasons for this. First, unlike Arabic or Chinese, Indonesian is written in Roman characters; second, it has no word stress – all syllables are pronounced equally; and third, unlike Thai or Vietnamese, Indonesian is not a tonal language. Its basic intonation is conventional: it uses a rising intonation for ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ questions and a falling intonation for questions beginning with ‘who’, ‘where’, ‘when’, ‘how’, ‘why’, and statements, just as in English.
