NOTION NOTION Volume 01, Number 01, May 2019 13 How Close Are Western Cham Language and Bahasa Indonesia in their Structure? A Contrastive Study Math Safeat, Muhammad Hafiz Kurniawan* Musa Asiah Foundation, Krouch Chmar, Thbong Khmum, Cambodia safir1585@gmail.com Universitas Ahmad Dahlan, Yogyakarta, Indonesia muhammad.kurniawan@enlitera.uad.ac.id* *Corresponding Author Article Info ABSTRACT Article History Article Received 24 th March 2019 Article Reviewed 28 th March 2019 Article Accepted 9 th April 2019 Keywords Bahasa Indonesia Cham language Contrastive analysis language Endangerment Phrase and sentence structure Western Cham spoken in Cambodia is categorized as Malay-Polynesian under the West Malay Polynesian with the largest speakers compared to its sister, Eastern Cham spoken in Vietnam. The fallen kingdom of Champa in 1442 brought pervasive and massive change to this language both spoken and writing system. The language contact between these languages to the neighboring language makes these languages survive by adopting the phonotactics of neighboring languages. However, this change can be traced back to its family and this research aims to find and to describe the difference and similarity between Bahasa Indonesia and Cham language using contrastive analysis. This analysis is used to elaborate the phrase structure, and simple clause structure with different voices, negation, and the use of adverb already which has its unique application. This research, which was fully funded by PPSDK (Pusat Pengembangan Stategi Diplomasi dan Kebahasaan) under the Ministry of Education of Republic Indonesia and also supported by Universitas Ahmad Dahlan and Musa Asiah Foundation (YASMA), was conducted in four months in a Muslim private School in Krouch Chmar, Cambodia and has secondary aim to support the development of this language and to preserve it from language endangerment status, because of its limited use in social settings. I. INTRODUCTION Cham language is one of the Austronesian languages spoken in Cambodia and Vietnam, which are known as Western and Eastern Cham [1] which are basically in the same language but different dialect [2]. This happened because basically Western and Eastern Cham were from the same kingdom which was called the Kingdom of Champa and this Kingdom was predicted to exist in 270 [3] which also left the linguistic evidence of stone inscription in the former region of Champa in 4 th Century AD [4] and likely this proof make Hendrik Kern think that the origin of Bahasa Indonesia was from the region of Champa [3]. Although the Cham language is considered into Austronesian language and closely related to Malay Polynesian under the West Malay Polynesian [1, 4]. The language contact between the Cham people and the people surrounding the kingdom happened when the people of Khmer and the Cham people were in contact in the trading activity [5, 6]. This affected to the change of their language into disyllabic and iambic [2], while the Eastern Cham, it adopt the Vietnam language and make this language change from disyllabic into monosyllabic [2]. However, the language contact happened not only between Cham and Khmer but also between Cham and Malay because the Cham scholars who pursue their education to Malay to learn Islam in the first Islamic teaching in Cambodia[7].