Indonesian vs Swedish: 300 Words That Are Nearly Identical

Indonesian vs Swedish: 300 Words That Are Nearly Identical: the list

Tips

• Look for the doubled-consonant pattern rather than treating each word as a one-off: Swedish often doubles a consonant where Indonesian keeps a single one, as in mama/mamma, papa/pappa and sama/samma.
• In some loanwords Indonesian writes p where Swedish has f, as in telepon/telefon — but not always, since foto/foto keeps the f, so check rather than assume.
• Bank the identical spellings first for quick confidence: film/film, problem/problem, musik/musik, foto/foto, pistol/pistol and person/person need almost no extra effort.
• Watch word endings: Indonesian drops the final -t in agen/agent and presiden/president, yet keeps it in kapten/kapten, so learn the ending along with the word.
• Revise vowel-shuffled pairs together, such as dokter/doktor and kantor/kontor, since recognising them by eye is easy but writing them correctly is where learners slip.
• Type the Indonesian word from the English prompt instead of only recognising it — production drills expose the one- and two-letter differences that passive reading hides.

Frequently asked questions

Why do Indonesian and Swedish share so many similar words?

The two languages are not related, but both took in words from the same pool of international vocabulary tied to science, government and modern life, so forms like agen/agent and presiden/president ended up close to each other.

Can I rely on these look-alikes as exact translations?

Treat them as strong starting guesses rather than guarantees. The pairs listed here share an English meaning, but similar spelling does not promise identical usage, so it is still worth meeting each word in a real sentence.

How should a Swedish speaker approach learning Indonesian vocabulary?

Start with the words spelled identically or almost identically, such as film/film and musik/musik, to build momentum, then learn the recurring patterns — doubled consonants, occasional f/p swaps, dropped final consonants — so you can make educated guesses at new words.

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