Indonesian language (2024)

…of the Republic of Indonesia, Bahasa Indonesia, or Indonesian. A Malay pidgin called Bazaar Malay (mĕlayu pasar, “market Malay”) was widely used as a lingua franca in the East Indian archipelago and was the basis of the colonial language used in Indonesia by the Dutch. The version of Bazaar Malay…

…in counting objects, as with Bahasa Indonesia se-buah rumah ‘a house’ (literally, ‘one-fruit house’), se-orang guru ‘a teacher’ (literally, ‘one-person teacher’), or se-batang rokok ‘a cigarette’ (literally, ‘one-trunk cigarette’). In some languages of Micronesia the traditional counting systems were highly complex, with upwards of 30 number classifiers that distinguished counted…

…to propagate the national language, Bahasa Indonesia, and to unify the country’s disparate ethnic groups and scattered islands. The government also initiated one of Asia’s most successful family-planning programs in order to slow down the growth of Indonesia’s large population. These successes were increasingly marred, however, by the inequitable distribution…

>Bahasa Indonesia, but hundreds of local languages and dialects remain in use across the vast archipelago. Javanese, for example, has more than twice as many native speakers as Bahasa Indonesia. The Philippines, which also has hundreds of local languages and dialects, has adopted Pilipino (or…

Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) is the national language. It evolved from a literary style of Malay language that was used in the royal houses of the Riau-Jambi area of eastern Sumatra, but it also has much in common with other Malay dialects that have long served…

Malay and Indonesian are, respectively, the official languages of Malaysia and Indonesia; these languages are quite similar and are mutually intelligible. Indonesian is a good example of a true national language and is spoken widely across the archipelago. Thus, unlike in Myanmar, language actually has been a…