Exploring Lexical Differences Between Indonesian and Malay

Contemporary Indonesian and Malay share the same origin and therefore show remarkable similarities. However, as society and culture have great impacts on language, differences between these two languages could not be neglected. This paper studies the lexical differences of these two languages from three angles: words appearing only in one language., interlingual homographs and words frequently used in one language but not in the other., by analyzing large-scale Indonesian and Malay news texts. Using the techniques in natural language processing and statistics., we effectively extracts the wanted words and reveal that obvious differences exist between the vocabulary of these two languages. Our work somehow fill the gap in the contrastive study of Indonesian and Malay., as well as facilitate research on the influences of society and culture on language.