Cognate relations of basic lexical inventory development among Filipino, Indonesian, and Malay languages

Autochthonous Asian languages of the Austronesian family, such as Filipino, Malay, and Indonesians share true and false cognates, sometimes leading to communication breakdowns. Employing contrastive analysis, this study determined the true and false cognates among the languages by identifying lexical and semantic relations and contrasting the orthographical and phonological features of the identified cognates. This study’s data sources were derived from different forms of literature, such as newspapers, business correspondence, books, magazines, and published or unpublished school essays written in source languages. Applying the Hierarchical Model and Finnegan’s method, this study identified 28 confirmed and 32 false cognates. The true cognates were lexically and semantically related: 68 synonyms, seven antonyms, four polysemy, seven heterosymy, four heteronymy, and four hyponymy. Meanwhile, false cognates show contrasting phonological and orthographical meanings, which may create confusion. Finally, a lexical inventory of Filipino, Malay, and Indonesian languages was crafted as the study’s contribution to foreign language teaching.