Indonesian language in modern Indonesian, 1,000 Arabic loans, some of Persian and Hebrew origin, some 125 words of Portuguese, some of Spanish and Italian origin, and 10,000 loanwords from Dutch. The vast majority of Indonesian words, however, come from the root lexical stock of Austronesian (including Old Malay). The study of Indonesian etymology and loan words reveals both its historical and social contexts. Examples are the early Sanskrit borrowings from the 7th century during the trading era, the borrowings from Arabic and Persian during the time of the establishment of Islam in particular, and those from Dutch during the colonial period. Linguistic
Indonesian language by the root), -an (collectivity, similarity, object, place, instrument), ke-...-an (abstractions and qualities, collectivities), per-/peng-...-an (abstraction, place, goal or result). Indonesian does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only selected words that use natural gender. For instance, the same word is used for "he/him" and "she/her" ( or ) or for "his" and "her" (, or ). No real distinction is made between "girlfriend" and "boyfriend", both (although more colloquial terms as girl/girlfriend and boy/boyfriend can also be found). A majority of Indonesian words that refer to people generally have a form that does not distinguish between