LEARN BEGINNING IN DONESIAN
W h a t Is Indonesian? The History of the Indonesian Language
Indonesian is a 2 0 t h century name for Malay. Depending on how you defi ne 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 variati ons, it is spoken b y more than 2 0 0 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 C o c o s 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 d e s c e nt in Sri Lanka, South Africa and other places.
HOW MANY P EO P L E S P E A K INDONESIAN? Accordin g to Ethnologue, Indonesian is a small language. It is alleged that only 23 million Indonesians sp eak Bahasa Indonesia nati vely whereas Malaysian is said to have 3 9 million nati ve speakers. Wikipedia, which relies on the data provided b y Ethnologue, cauti ons us that “the defi niti on of a single language is to s om e extent arbitrary”. For this reason, “some mutually intelligible idioms with separate nati onal standards or self-identi fi cati on have been listed together, including Hindi-Urdu; [and] Indonesian and Malay”.
Virtually all speakers of regional languages do also speak Indonesian. In many cases, they spe ak it more frequently, and oft en also bett er than their nati ve language as Indonesian is the preferred language of inter-ethnic communicati on. More than 9 0 % of speakers of regional languages are literate. When they write, they will almost exclusively write in Indonesian, and the literature they read is enti rely in Indonesian. The last newspaper in the J ava n e s e language was published about 75 years ago. The regional languages have also been heavily infl uenced b y Indonesian, mainly in the lexicon, but oft en also in phonology, morphology, or syntax.
Indonesian Native Speakers — Myth and RealityAbstract:
The number of nati ve speakers of the Indonesian language is generally underesti mated. An extreme c a s e is Ethnologue which until recently maintained that the Indonesian language has 23 million nati ve speakers. The prevailing picture is that the vast majority of Indonesians sp eak a regional language as their mother tongue and begin to learn Indonesian when they go to school. A s the result of the relati ve late exposure to the nati onal language, most Indonesians cannot be considered as nati ve speakers of bahasa Indonesia.
Indonesia n—An Austronesian Language In Indonesian, the I ndonesian language is called Bahasa Indonesia. It is essenti ally the s a m e language as Malay (Bahasa Melayu) or Malaysian (Bahasa Malaysia). Bahasa Indonesia is the nati onal language of Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia is the nati onal language of Malaysia and Brunei, and one of four nati onal languages of Singapore.
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