The territory of this island state is one of the largest in the world. Indonesia ranks 14th in terms of area occupied. But in terms of the number of inhabitants, the country is the fourth on the planet and more than 257 million Indonesians use more than seven hundred dialects and dialects in their daily communication. But the status of the state language in Indonesia has been assigned to only one - Indonesian.
Some statistics and facts
- Indonesian is a modified version of the Malay language that belongs to the Austronesian family.
- The largest number of speakers of the dialect in the country are Indonesians who speak Javanese.
- Having been widespread on the territory of the Dutch colony for almost 300 years, the Indonesian language borrowed a lot from Dutch. There are Arabic and Portuguese words in local dialects, because Indonesia was at the crossroads of trade routes during the era of colonization.
- The Indonesian version of Malay is spoken by over 210 million people. Three times less fluent in Javanese, and residents of West Java and Banten prefer to communicate in the Sundanese dialect.
Indonesian: history and features
The official language of Indonesia belongs to the vast Malay-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. The Malay language used Indian and Arabic scripts in different eras, while modern Indonesian uses the Latin script. The alphabet consists of 26 letters, which represent 30 sounds.
Officially, the status of the state Indonesian language was assigned in 1945. It took shape as an independent one in the first third of the twentieth century, when its name was adopted at the 1928 Youth Congress.
The Malay language received special development in the Middle Ages, when the traditional genres of Malay poetry developed. Since that time, the Malay language has been used as a means of interethnic communication and interstate economic and political ties in the region of the coastal civilization of the Malay Archipelago.
Tourist notes
In Indonesia, English is widely taught as a foreign language in schools and in tourist places, in resorts and in national parks, English-speaking staff are rather frequent. In cities, café and restaurant menus, maps, traffic patterns, and information about shops and tourist attractions are usually duplicated in English.
