INDONESIAN-ONLINE

Learn Bahasa Indonesia now

W H AT IS INDONESIAN? —
THE H IST ORY OF T H E
INDONESIA N LANGUAGE
Indonesian is a 20 thcentury name for Malay.
Depending on how you define 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. W ith dialect
variations it is spoken by more than 200 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 A ustralia’ s C ocos K eeling 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
descent in Sri Lanka, South Africa and other
places.
 H OW
MANY
P EOP L E
SP EAK
INDONESIAN?
According to Ethnologue, Indonesian is a
small language. It is alleged that only
23
million Indonesians speak bahasa Indonesia
natively whereas Malaysian is said to have
39 million native speakers. Wikipedia, which
relies on the data provided by Ethnologue,
cautions us that “ the definition of a
single
language is to some extent arbitrary”. For this
reason, “ some mutually intelligible
idioms with separate national standards
or self-
identification have been l isted
together, including Hindi- Urdu; [ and]
Indonesian and
Malay”.
 INDONESIAN NAT IV E SP EAK ERS
— MY T H AND REAL IT Y
ABSTRACT:

The number of native speakers of the Indonesian language is general ly

underest imated. An ex tr em e case is E t h no l o gu e which u n ti l r e c e n t l y maint ai ned
that the Indonesian language has 23 m i l l i o n native speakers.
 In Indonesian, the Indonesian language is
INDONESIAN— called bahasa Indonesia. It is essentially the

AN same
language as M alay ( Bahasa M elayu) or
M alaysian ( Bahasa M alaysia). Bahasa
AUSTRONESIAN Indonesia is the
national language of Indonesia and Bahasa
LANGUAGE Malaysia is the national language of Malaysia
and Brunei, and one of four national languages
of Singapore.
DICT IONARIES AND GRAMMARS
F OR L EARNERS OF
INDONESIAN
By far the best Indonesian- English d i c t i o n a r y is A C o m p r e h e n s i v e Indonesian-
English D i c t i o n a r y : 2 nd E d i t i o n by A l an M. Stevens & A. Schmidgall-
Tellings ( Editors). H o w e v e r , it is qui te expensive. A cheaper option, but
s t i l l good, is
Kamus Indonesia- Inggris: An Indonesian- English D i c t i o n a r y by Hassan
Shadily. There is also an English- Indonesuian d i c t i o n a r y from the same
author. B o t h are very good. Then there is the equal ly good Indonesian- English
The Le ar ne r’ s
D i c t i o n a r y of Today’ s Indonesian by G eo r ge Quinn. These are the only ones
that we can rec ommend at the moment.
 DID Y OU
KouNOW ?
can learn Indonesian online at the
O u t r e a c h C o l l e g e of the U n i v e r s i t y of
H a w a i i at M a n o a and get u n i v e r s i t y
credits? C o n t a c t the Indonesian
Language
Program.
ADDRESS
1060 K AH UL UI
ST .
H ONOL UL U,
H AW AI'I 96825 (USA)
WA/SMS/
P H : + 1.808.365.7043
F OR MORE DEAT IL S V ISIT OUR WWW.INDONESIAN-ONLINE.COM
W EBSIT E-