Bahasa Indonesia is a member of the Austronesian language family, and is a standardization of the Malay language, which had been used in the archipelago for centuries as an inter-island trade language. The Austronesian language family is the fifth-largest language family in the world, with 386 million native speakers (4.9% of the world's population). Malaysian and Indonesian are the two widest-spoken languages in the Austronesian language family. Malay was influenced heavily by Sanskrit in ancient times, and as a result it is difficult to distinguish Sanskrit loan words as foreign by native speakers. It is so heavily influential on modern Indonesian that one could write a short story using only Sanskrit loan words. Due to its trade relationship with China going back over a millennium, Chinese loan words make up a lot of vocabulary relating to cuisine and trade. Especially since the 12th century, Arabic has influenced Malay language relating to religious vocabulary. Even the word for the Christian bible ("Alkitab", lit. "the book") is of Arabic origin.
Since the Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach Indonesia and conduct trade, many of the Portuguese loan words have to do with the items that were exposed to native Indonesians with the arrival of the Portuguese. Such examples are Meja (from mesa = table), jendela (from janela = window, and keju (from queijo = cheese). The Dutch, who colonized Indonesia for centuries, left a big impression on the Indonesian vocabulary, including words like polisi (from politie = police), kantor (from kantoor = office) and setrum (from stroom = electricity current). Through globalization, some English words have made their way, although it can be difficult to differentiate from Dutch loan words as they are both of Germanic origin. Examples include imajinasi (imagination) and universitas (university). Bahasa Indonesia uses a latin script, and used to utilize Dutch phonological spellings; these have since been replaced ("tj", pronounced "ch", became "c", and "dj", pronounced "j", became "j", etc.).
This information can be helpful because it allows one to make a guess as to how the Indonesian language may transform words from their original language in order to be incorporated as a loan word. As I know a little Portuguese from being around family who are native speakers, certain words are mutually intelligible for me.
It seems that languages change over time mostly to incorporate new words for things that had either previously been unnamed or had not been known to exist. I recently learned from my apartment-mate that Latin as used in the Vatican church has been constantly been incorporating new words for technologies such as Television and Cars in order to keep church edicts up-to-date. As the world around us is constantly changing, language, one of the systems we rely on to make sense of it, must constantly be growing and adjusting as well.
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