The grammar of Indonesia is similar to the grammar of other Austronesian languages, which include Malay, Tagalog, and Hawaiian. Indonesian has just two verb tenses, past and present, and two verb voices, active and passive. There are no verb conjugations, and no gender distinctions in the language. Indonesian also has a simple word order, with the subject preceding the object.
The basic word order in Indonesian is subject-verb-object (SVO), as in “I eat rice.” However, Indonesian can also be verb-subject-object …