Here’s a paragraph if you don’t need to go to the link to recognize it:
“Sebelum kita masuk ke dalam pikiran dan langkah-langkah sang pengorganisir masyarakat lebih dalam, ada baiknya kita membahas, Apa sih pengorganisasian masyarakat itu?. Apa sih filosofi, nilai-nilai dan tujuan dari pengorganisasian masyarakat itu?. Dimana, bagaimana saja pengorganisasian ini dapat dijalankan, siapa yang menggunakan-nya?. Apa bedanya pengorganisasian masyarakat dengan strategi atau intervensi lain yang bertujuan sama, yaitu membantu rakyat miskin dan terpinggirkan?.”
I tried looking for the mentioning of a city or nation in the pages, but gave up. I thought SE Asian, but I notice it has a lot of phonetic spellings of words from the West.
Could also be Tagalog aka Filipino. It’s closely related to Malay and other South East Asian languages, but has incorporated a lot of words from English and Spanish, so that’s where the similarities to Western terms could come from.
It is Indonesian, I think. The giveaway is the hyphenated plurals such as “nilai-nilai”, “langkah-langkah”. I know of no other language which forms plurals by doubling the word, but Malay or Tagalog might also do so.
Most definitely not Tagalog. It’s either Indonesian or Malaysian. My guess is that it’s Indonesian. Deep in the middle of the page, there’s this reference:
Most linguists consider both to constitute one “language”. There are some differences, and so it still makes sense for contributors to this thread to pinpoint which it is, but I thought I’d mention this nitpick, anyway, in the SDMB nitpick tradition.
I used to speak some Bahasa Indonesia (“Language (of) Indonesia”) which is about as similar to Malay as American English is to British English. I can’t find anything in the text that looks strange to me so I would bet money it is modern Bahasa Indonesia, not Malaysian Malay or any language from the Philippines.
As for making plurals by doubling a noun, I’ve heard that done often in Africa. I don’t know whether it is done in any formal Bantu language but I’ve heard it in French pidgins.
Chinese does so sometimes, too. Anyhow, the linguistics term for the doubling of words or parts of words is “reduplication” for anyone who wants to research it.
I was thinking of the tree-woods-forest (木, 林, 森 ) and human-everybody (人, 人人 ) example myself, but I guess you’re right in that those aren’t plurals in the sense we’re discussing.
If I understand correctly, there is no language called “Indonesian”, but Indonesia actually has hundreds of different languages, though many are similar.
No, I think there is “Indonesian.” They call it “bahasa Indonesia,” but “bahasa” just means “language.” It’s like when they say “phasa Thai,” but “phasa” just means "language. Then there are ethnic languages, like maybe in Papua. But the brief time I’ve spent in Indonesia, they seemed to refer to the language as “Indonesian.”
Ah yes. I see in my references that “Indonesian” is the national language, while there are 300-plus other languages throughout the area, with many different regional dialects within each one. And that Sumatra alone has five different language groups, Sulawesi six, and the tiny island of Alor no fewer than seven. Apparently “Indonesian” derives from one of the five main Sumatran groups
That all sounds familiar now. It’s been awhile, but my dealings were on Java and Bali. I remember one conference in Yogyakarta in which the Malaysian participants remarked on how close to Malaysian the Indonesian language was. All of my business would have been with people fluent in the national language, and all of the writing you see in the larger cities are standard Indonesian.