Exploring Letter’s Differences between Partial Indonesian Branch Language and English

Abstract

Differences of letter usage are the most basic differences between different languages, which can reflect the most essential diversity. Many linguists study the letter differences between common languages, but seldom research those between non-common languages. This paper selects three representative languages from the Indonesian branch of the Austronesian language family, namely Malay, Indonesian and Filipino. To study the letter differences between these three languages and English, we concentrate on word length distribution, letter frequency distribution, commonly used letter pairs, commonly used letter trigrams, and ranked letter frequency distribution. The results show that great differences do exist between three Indonesian-branch languages and English, and the differences between Malay and Indonesian are the smallest.