The
official language of
Indonesia, very similar to
Malay, and in fact derived from it. Came into being very recently, with the
independence movement (
One language, one nation!). Exceptionally easy for westerners to learn, among the
asian languages.
No tones.
No plurals.
No verb tenses.
No articles.
Very few different vowels.
Very few consonant clusters.
Most importantly, English and bahasa Indonesia are linguistic twins...not that they are historically related, but they share in common almost all important linguistic parameters, such as subject-verb-object and head-initial word order. The effect of this is that if you do a word-for-word translation of something in Indonesian, the chances are good that you will come out with something close to a grammatical sentence in English, without having to swap everything around. Don't try this with Japanese...or German for that matter.
Calling it simply "bahasa" is a common mistake. Bahasa means language.