Key takeaways
- Destination decides this more than anything else: Indonesian is the national language of Indonesia, while Malay holds official status in Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore.
- The two share a grammar and most of a core vocabulary, so the second one is dramatically cheaper to add than the first — this is not a decision you are locked into.
- Indonesian has the larger speaker base by the published figures, and in our experience the larger pool of learner material, which matters if you want variety.
- Most everyday divergence is vocabulary rather than structure, and much of it traces to Dutch loanwords on the Indonesian side and English ones on the Malaysian side.
- We publish a Malay course and no Indonesian one, so treat our view as interested and check any platform's current catalogue yourself before committing.
Start from the destination. If you are heading to Indonesia, study Indonesian. If you are heading to Malaysia, Brunei or Singapore, study Malay. If you have family on one side of that line, study theirs. Everything else in this article is refinement, and the refinement matters less than people expect, because the two standards are close enough that the second one costs you weeks rather than years.
Disclosure: this article is published by Reign Creative LLC. We publish an Android course for Malay and we do not publish one for Indonesian, so we have a direct commercial interest in one of the two answers. We have written it to be useful if you choose the other one, and the section below on resourcing is the part where we are arguing against ourselves.
Last verified: 15 September 2026.
How we made this comparison
Language-level facts here come from published reference material, cited inline and listed at the end, read on 15 September 2026. Claims about our own app come from the app itself and its Google Play listing. Where we describe another company's product, we report only what we could read on that company's own page on the research date, and where a page did not let us read what we needed, we say so rather than filling the gap from memory. Course catalogues change without notice; check the current one before you decide.
They are two standards of one language, not two languages
This is the fact that reframes the whole question. Indonesian is described in reference sources as a standardised variety of Malay, standardised from Classical Malay of the Riau-Lingga tradition. Malay in the wider sense is official in Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore, and in Indonesia in the form of Indonesian.
So the choice is closer to British versus American English than to French versus Italian, except that the divergence is a bit wider and lands in different places.
| Dimension | Malay (Standard) | Indonesian | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Official status | Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore | Indonesia | Malay language; Indonesian language |
| Speakers (2020 figures) | About 80 million L1, close to 300 million including L2 across the family | 75 million L1, 252 million total | Malay language; Indonesian language |
| Script | Latin (Rumi); Jawi co-official in Brunei and Malaysia | Latin | Malay language |
| Main loanword layer | English | Dutch | Comparison of Indonesian and Standard Malay |
| Spelling of borrowings | televisyen, kualiti | televisi, kualitas | Comparison of Indonesian and Standard Malay |
| Everyday divergence | pejabat pos (post office) | kantor pos (from Dutch kantoor) | Comparison of Indonesian and Standard Malay |
| Shared spelling reform | 1972 reform aligned both on c and j | Same | Comparison of Indonesian and Standard Malay |
The grammar column is missing from that table because there is nothing to put in it. Both have Latin script, no tones, no grammatical gender, no case, no verb agreement for person or number, and the same affix machinery — the meN-, ber-, ter-, di-, -kan and -i system covered in our Malay affixes guide works the same way in both.
Where the divergence actually bites
Conversationally, less than you would think. In writing and in formal registers, more.
Wikipedia's comparison article reports an intelligibility test in which around 30 per cent of the totality of Indonesian newspaper content was found "odd, unintelligible and unusual" by Malaysian speakers. That is one reported test in a survey article rather than a settled measurement, and it should be read as an order of magnitude rather than a number. But the direction is right, and it matches what learners report: a conversation goes fine and a newspaper editorial does not.
The reason is the loanword layer. Indonesian took its administrative, technical and institutional vocabulary largely from Dutch; Malaysian Malay took a comparable layer from English. Those are the words that cluster in formal writing, which is exactly where the two texts stop resembling each other. There is also a coordinating body, MABBIM, spanning Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia, and the same source is blunt that its coordination "is not working properly" — so do not assume the two standards are converging on your timetable.
Our Malay vs Indonesian article goes through the divergence itself in more detail. This page is about which one to pick.
The resourcing question, and where we are honestly weaker
Here is the argument against choosing Malay, and it is a real one.
Indonesian reaches more people by the published figures, and in our own experience of building for these languages, more material exists for learners: more courses, more graded readers, more podcasts, more people to practise with online. When a language has a larger learner population, everything downstream of that gets easier, and that advantage compounds over the year or two that actually matters.
If your goal is simply "a Southeast Asian language, I do not mind which", that consideration should probably decide it, and it points away from us.
What we can tell you about specific platforms is limited, deliberately:
| Feature | Learn Malay - Bahasa Melayu (ours) | Duolingo | Verification source | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard Malay course from English | Yes — the full beginner course, Latin script throughout | Not verified: the catalogue page renders its course list in the browser rather than in the page source, so we could not read it and make no claim | Our app and its Google Play listing; duolingo.com/courses | 15 September 2026 |
| Indonesian course from English | No — we do not publish one | Not verified, same reason | Our app catalogue; duolingo.com/courses | 15 September 2026 |
| Price model | Free to download, ad-supported, optional in-app purchases | Not verified from the catalogue page we read | Our Google Play listing; duolingo.com/courses | 15 September 2026 |
We could have filled that middle column from memory. We are not going to, because a course list is exactly the kind of fact that changes between when an article is written and when you read it, and a confidently wrong absence claim is worse for you than an honest blank. Open the platform's own course page and look. Our wider piece on language learning apps compared works through what to do when your language is not on a large platform at all.
Why we built a Malay course and not an Indonesian one
The short version: we build one language per app, and Malay was the one we could resource properly.
The longer version is that the decision forced specific choices we then had to live with. Committing to Standard Malay meant committing to Malaysian spelling of borrowings throughout — televisyen rather than televisi, kualiti rather than kualitas — and to the Malaysian everyday word where the two differ, pejabat rather than kantor. It meant our travel, shopping and transport units are built around Malaysian and Bruneian contexts. It meant that a learner who is actually going to Jakarta will find a course that is 80 per cent useful to them and confidently wrong in the remaining 20, which is a worse experience than being obviously wrong would be.
So Learn Malay - Bahasa Melayu is explicit about what it is. The culture and regional notes exist precisely to flag where usage differs across communities, and the course does not treat Indonesian as the same language. Vocabulary is grouped by situation rather than presented as lists, grammar is taught on Malay terms — word order, pronouns, possession, questions, classifiers, reduplication, passive forms and the affix system — and the review modes, Daily Review, Mistake Rescue, Listening Blitz, Sentence Builder and Dictation Mode among them, pull back whatever you got wrong. There is no hearts or lives system, so mistakes never block you.
What it is not: an Indonesian course with a different flag on it.
What to do if you pick the other one
Learn Indonesian, and then read Malay later if you need it. The transfer is genuinely high, and the adjustment is a vocabulary list plus a spelling convention, not a second grammar.
The reverse is equally true, which is the most reassuring thing in this article: whichever you pick, you have not spent the other one. Choose by destination, and if you have no destination, choose Indonesian for the resourcing and accept that you will one day spend a fortnight learning that kantor is pejabat.
If you land on Malay, the beginner's guide sets out a realistic first month. Our other courses are listed under language learning, and the rest of these articles under language learning articles.
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Good to know
Frequently asked questions
Are Malay and Indonesian mutually intelligible?
Which is easier to learn?
Which has more speakers?
If I learn one, how much of the other do I get free?
Which language apps offer a Malay course?
Sources
- Comparison of Indonesian and Standard Malay (opens in a new tab)Wikipedia — accessed
- Indonesian language (opens in a new tab)Wikipedia — accessed
- Malay language (opens in a new tab)Wikipedia — accessed
- Duolingo course catalogue (opens in a new tab)Duolingo — accessed
About the author
Reign Creative LLC — The independent app studio that builds the apps covered on this site and publishes every article here. On Google Play it publishes as Reign Collective Apps.
We use AI tools to help research, draft and edit our articles. Each article lists the sources its factual claims rely on, and details about our apps come from their live Google Play listings. No article on this site has been reviewed by an independent expert unless the reviewer is named on it.
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