INDONESIAN LANGUAGE FACTS:

NATIVE: Bahasa Indonesia

NATIVE SPEAKERS: 43 million and 156 million L2 speakers

OFFICIAL LANGUAGE IN: Indonesia

WRITING SYSTEMS: Latin (Indonesian alphabet)

REGULATED BY: Badan Pengembangan dan Pembinaan Bahasa (The Language Development and Fostering Agency)

Helpful Resources:

Dictionaries:

Sneddon, James N. Indonesian: a comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge, 1996.

Kramer, A. L. N, Willie Koen, and Katherine Davidsen. Tuttle concise Indonesian dictionary: Indonesian-English, English-Indonesian. Bilingual ed. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2014.

Academic and Research:

Yale University, Indonesian Language Studies

Indonesian Language

Most Indonesians, in addition to speaking the national language, are fluent in any of more than 700 indigenous local languages. Formal education and national media, however, are conducted in Indonesian. The language has been a unifying force in a linguistically and ethnically diverse archipelago.

Economic Significance

Indonesia is the forth most populous nation in the world.

History

Indonesian is a standardized register of Malay, which was spoken in the archipelago for over half a millennium. Indonesian is remarkable in that it can be considered one of the only true national languages. European traders and colonists never imposed a linguistic assimilation policy and, likewise, the Indonesian population rarely spoke European languages. When Indonesia declared independence in 1945, only 5% of the population spoke Indonesian. Indonesian was chosen as the national language for practical reasons. It was neither European, nor a widely spoken language. With more than 700 indigenous local languages and numerous ethnic groups, Indonesian was a neutral unifying language.

Dialects

Please contact us for more information. The varieties and dialects are too numerous for this page.