Languages of Indonesia

More than 700 living languages are spoken in Indonesia. Most belong to the Austronesian language family, with a few Papuan languages also spoken. The official language is Indonesian (locally known as Bahasa Indonesia), a variant of Malay, which was used in the archipelago, borrowing heavily from local languages of Indonesia such as Javanese, Sundanese and Minangkabu. The Indonesian language is primarily used in commerce, administration, education and the media, but most Indonesians speak other languages, such as Javanese, as their first language. Most books printed in Indonesia are written in the Indonesian language.

Since Indonesia recognises only a single official language, other languages are not recognised either at the national level or the regional level, thus making Javanese the most widely spoken language without official status, with Sundanese the second in the list (excluding Chinese dialects).

Below is a chart of several Indonesian languages. Most of them belong to Austronesian languages family. While there has been misunderstandings on which ones should be classified as language and which ones should be classified as dialect, the chart confirms that most have similarities, yet are not mutually comprehensible. These languages are arranged according to the numbers of native speakers.

There are 726 languages spoken across the Indonesian archipelago in 2009 (dropped from 742 languages in 2007), the largest multilingual population in the world only after Papua New Guinea. Indonesian Papua, which is adjacent to Papua New Guinea, has the most languages in Indonesia. Based on the EGIDS classification used by Ethnologue (formerly the Summer Institute of Linguistics), 63 languages are dying (shown in red on the bar chart, subdivided into Moribund and Nearly Extinct, or Dormant), which is defined as "The only fluent users (if any) are older than child-bearing age, so it is too late to restore natural intergenerational transmission through the home."

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