Learn Bahasa Indonesia Indonesian is a 20th Century name for Malay.
Indonesian is a 20th Century name for Malay. Depending on how you define a language and how you count its number of speakers, today Malay-Indonesian ranks around sixth or seventh in size among the world’s languages. With dialect variations, it is spoken by more than 200 million people in the modern states of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei.
It is also an important vernacular in the southern provinces of Thailand, in East Timor and among the Malay people of Australia’s Cocos Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean. It is understood in parts of the Sulu area of the southern Philippines and traces of it are to be found among people of Malay descent in Sri Lanka, South Africa and other places.
According to Ethnologue, Indonesian is a small language. It is alleged that only 23 million Indonesians speak bahasa Indonesia natively whereas Malaysian is said to have 39 million native speakers. Wikipedia, which relies on the data provided by Ethnologue, cautions us that “the definition of a single language is to some extent arbitrary”.
Virtually all speakers of regional languages do also speak Indonesian. In many cases, they speak it more frequently, and often also better than their native language as Indonesian is the preferred language of inter-ethnic communication. More than 90% of speakers of regional languages are literate. When they write, they will almost exclusively write in Indonesian, and the literature they read is entirely in Indonesian. The last newspaper in the Javanese language was published about 75 years ago. The regional languages have also been heavily influenced by Indonesian, mainly in the lexicon, but often also in phonology, morphology, or syntax.
The number of native speakers of the Indonesian language is generally underestimated. An extreme case is Ethnologue which until recently maintained that the Indonesian language has 23 million native speakers. The prevailing picture is that the vast majority of Indonesians speak a regional language as their mother tongue and begin to learn Indonesian when they go to school. As the result of the relatively late exposure to the national language, most Indonesians cannot be considered as native speakers of bahasa Indonesia.
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