Abstract:
The number of native speakers of the Indonesian language is generally underestimated. One extreme example is Ethnologue, which until recently stated that Indonesian has only 23 million native speakers. The common perception is that the majority of Indonesians speak a regional language as their first language and only begin learning Indonesian when they start school. Consequently, due to their relatively late exposure to the national language, most Indonesians cannot be considered native speakers of Bahasa Indonesia.
However, this paper argues that the aforementioned scenario may have been true in post-independence Indonesia and possibly up until the 1980s, but it no longer reflects the linguistic reality of 21st-century Indonesia. Today, Indonesian is universally understood, even in the most remote parts of the country. The majority of Indonesians now grow up in a bilingual environment speaking Indonesian and a regional language. While many Indonesians still use regional languages within their families, they typically switch to Indonesian when the conversation moves beyond familiar topics.
Using data from the 2010 census and other sources, it is argued that the number of native speakers of the Indonesian language has exceeded one hundred million, which places Indonesian in the top-ten list of languages by the number of native speakers.
Summary
A brief summary of the article is available here.
Download
The full article is about 20 pages strong. You can download it free of charge. © Uli Kozok 2016.
Summary
A brief summary of the article is available here.