Indonesian - Indonesian language
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| Indonesian - Indonesian language |
Most Indonesians, aside from speaking the national language, are fluent in at least one of the more than 700 indigenous local languages; examples include Javanese and Sundanese, which are commonly used at home and within the local community.
However, most formal education and nearly all national mass media, governance, administration, and judiciary and other forms of communication are conducted in Indonesian.[10]
Under Indonesian rule from 1976 to 1999, Indonesian was designated as the official language of Timor Leste.
It currently has the status of a working language under the country's present constitution along with English.
The term Indonesian is primarily associated with the national standard dialect (bahasa baku).[14] However, in a looser sense, it also encompasses the various local varieties spoken throughout the Indonesian archipelago.
Standard Indonesian is confined mostly to formal situations, existing in a diglossic relationship with vernacular Malay varieties, which are commonly used for daily communication, coexisting with the aforementioned regional languages.[14][8]
The Indonesian name for the language (bahasa Indonesia) is also occasionally used in English and other languages.
Bahasa Indonesia is sometimes reduced to Bahasa, which refers to the Indonesian subject (Bahasa Indonesia) taught in schools, on the assumption that this is the name of the language.
but the word bahasa only means language. For example, Korean language is translated as bahasa Korea, and the same applies to other languages, such as bahasa Jepang (Japanese), bahasa Arab (Arabic), bahasa Italia (Italian), and so on.
Indonesians generally may not recognize the name Bahasa alone when it refers to their national language.
Selamat datang – Welcome
Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia ‘language of Indonesia’) is a member of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family.
Bahasa Indonesia is a standardized dialect of Malay which had been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries, and which achieved the status of an official language with the declaration of independence of Indonesia from the Netherlands in 1945.
The two languages are very similar in their sound system, grammar, and vocabulary.
Indonesian is the statutory national language of Indonesia where it is spoken by close to 23 million people. It is a second language for another 140 million people (Ethnologue).
Most Indonesians are bilingual, and many are proficient, to varying degrees, in three or four languages.
They learn at least one of the country’s many local languages at home, and later learn Indonesian in school.
Generally, Indonesian tends to be used in larger urban areas, while local languages are more widely used in small towns