Indonesian Phonology and the Evidence from Loanword Adaptation

The article first details the phonology of Indonesian in terms of its consonants and syllable structure inventories, based on previous research. Indonesian is renowned for its extensive borrowing; it is estimated that loanwords make up nearly 34% of Indonesian vocabulary. Our case study examines borrowings from Arabic and Dutch, and investigates the consonantal and syllabic repairs made by Indonesian speakers to adapt loanwords from these two languages. This leads to an evaluation of the evidence towards the long-standing debate about whether and how phonetics or phonology has an impact on the realization of borrowed words more generally. We conclude that loanword adaptation is primarily phonologically motivated in Indonesian.