From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The number of languages of Indonesia is 742.[1] Of those, 737 are living languages, 2 are second language without mother-tongue speakers, and 3 are extinct.[1] 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 modified version of Malay, which is used in commerce, administration, education and the media, but most Indonesians speak local languages, such as Javanese as a first language.[2]
Like most writing systems in human history, Indonesia's are not rendered in invented systems, but devised by speakers of Sanskrit, Arabic, and Latin. Malay, for example, has a long history as a written language and has been rendered in Indic, Arabic, and Roman writing systems. Javanese has been written in the Nagarai and Pallava writing systems of India, in a modified Arabic system called pegon that incorporates Javanese sounds, and in the Roman alphabet. Chinese characters have never been used to express Indonesian languages, although Indonesian place-names, personal names, and names of trade goods appear in reports and histories written for China's imperial courts.[3]
[edit] Languages spoken in Indonesia
Image: Indonesian Ethnolinguistic
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