The original article claimed that Manado Malay and Bahasa Indonesia are mutually unintelligible. This is absolutely untrue. What *is* true is that the Indonesian spoken in the region around Manado has far more Dutch loan words than official Bahasa Indonesia.
- That's why that language is considered to be a creole (mostly based on Malay grammatically, but with a deep influence from Dutch for its terminology, and now with increasing influence of other Germanic languages including English, due to contacts with the Philippines, but also older influences from Spanish or Portuguese which remain as they are also used/borrowed in English; as well there are some limited influences from other Austronesian and Sinitic languages). Yes there are still Malay/Indonesian words recognizable in common terms, because after all this is the national language and there's lot of contact, so people tend to mix them variably). But such mixing also occurs in modern Indonesian and Malay, so in some meaning there's a sort of "convergence" (meaning that it's not sure that Manado Malay will remain sufficiently distinct for long from Malay/Indonesian and their many local variants: the Indonesian "standard" is also evolving, just like the Malaysian standard), because most people are now becoming bilingual (and may be then, the Indoensian and Malay standards will converge and include their regional terminologies, to become a "hat language", no longer considered a creole -- like what occured in French, English, German or Dutch, after a long period of transition of several centuries and multiple reforms to develop their growing modern standard (which is now quite far from their original "Old" or "Middle" variants which were much more local/regional, so much that these older variants are difficult to read or write correctly by native people speaking the modern standards). In a long term however, the "Manado Malay" will remain as an historic point of evolution, which will be interesting to study for future readers and speakers of newer Indonesian/Malay standards when they will have evolved (if these Malay/Indonesian standards continue being used and not replaced later by another one, more inclusive). verdy_p (talk) 12:59, 8 December 2022 (UTC)Reply
