Countability in Indonesian and English: A Comparative Analysis

In many languages, countability is a linguistic category which claims importance due to its strong connection to the grammar of a language. A noun’s countability or uncountability may necessitate varying degrees of syntactic adjustment in a sentence. This paper investigates the workings of countability in Indonesian and English with regards to their respective grammar. Observation on several Indonesian and English nouns and sentences shows that the concept of countability is not universal since each language reserves its own criteria of distinguishing between the nouns which can be counted and those which cannot. Consequently, the situations in which syntactic adjustment may occur and the grammatical categories affected may be vastly different across languages. Indonesian and English agree on uncountability in several areas: proper names/places, fields of enquiry/languages, and sports/activities. Indonesian and English also share some grammatical conditions associated with uncountability: inability to be pluralized and to take numbers. However, English sentences show a higher degree of syntactic adjustment due to un/countability than Indonesian sentences do. In English it may affect articles, determiners, “size markers”, nouns, and verbs, whereas in Indonesian it may only affect nouns in the form of reduplication. Furthermore, the nouns that are considered un/countable in Indonesian might be considered otherwise in English, such as bagasi (countable in Indonesian) vs. baggage (uncountable in English). Finally, it can be argued that countability is primarily a grammatical feature which has little to do with the real nature of the noun in question.