Barriers in understanding language: A study on indonesian language online news texts portal,tempo.co [Hambatan memahami bahasa: Satu penelitian ke atas teks berita dalam talian berbahasa Indonesia,tempo.co]

The malay language in malaysia and that in indonesia belong to the same austronesian language family. however,due to political upheaval during the dutch-english colonization in indonesia and malaysia respectively,until after their independence,the malay languages in malaysia and indonesia have evolved separately,creating differences between the two. these differences are sometimes causing barrier in communication between speakers of both languages. in the written text for example,a malaysian malay speaker is known to struggle understanding an indonesian text. thus,this paper discusses the issue of barriers in understanding indonesian language. the main objective of this study is to identify and clarify the aspects of language that becomes barriers in understanding indonesian malay texts. for this purpose,news text from an indonesian online news portal tempo.co are analyzed. the texts collected are from various sections of the news that were published in tempo.co,between june and july 2015. the results showed four types of differences that contributes to barriers in understanding texts in indonesian,specifically vocabulary,affixes,acronyms and loan-words. © 2015,jurnal komunikasi malaysian journal of communication. all rights reserved.