Indonesian language
Indonesian is the official and national language of Indonesia. It is a standardized variety of Malay, an Austronesian language that has been used as a lingua franca in the multilingual Indonesian archipelago for centuries. With over 280 million inhabitants, Indonesia ranks as the fourth-most populous nation globally. According to the 2020 census, over 97% of Indonesians are fluent in Indonesian, making it the largest language by number of speakers in Southeast Asia and one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. Indonesian vocabulary has been influenced by various native regional languages such as Javanese, Sundanese, Minangkabau, Balinese, Banjarese, and Buginese, as well as by foreign languages such as Arabic, Dutch, Hokkien, Portuguese, Sanskrit, and English.
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.
Under Indonesian rule from 1976 to 1999, Indonesian was designated as the official language of East Timor. It has the status of a working language under the country's constitution along with English. In November 2023, the Indonesian language was recognized as one of the official languages of the UNESCO General Conference.
The term Indonesian is primarily associated with the national standard dialect. 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 and with Malay creoles; standard Indonesian is spoken in informal speech as a lingua franca between vernacular Malay dialects, Malay creoles, and regional languages.
History
Standard Indonesian is a standard language of "Riau Malay", which despite its common name is not based on the vernacular Malay dialects of the Riau Islands, but rather represents a form of Classical Malay as used in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the Riau-Lingga Sultanate. Classical Malay had emerged as a literary language in the royal courts along both shores of the Strait of Malacca, including the Johor Sultanate and Malacca Sultanate. Originally spoken in Northeast Sumatra, Malay has been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for half a millennium. It might be attributed to its ancestor, the Old Malay language. The Kedukan Bukit inscription is the oldest surviving specimen of Old Malay, the language used by Srivijayan empire. Since the 7th century, the Old Malay language has been used in Nusantara , evidenced by Srivijaya inscriptions and by other inscriptions from coastal areas of the archipelago, such as Sojomerto inscription.Indonesian has essentially the same material basis as the Malaysian standard of Malay and is therefore considered to be a variety of the pluricentric Malay language. However, it does differ from Malaysian Malay in several respects, with differences in pronunciation and vocabulary. These differences are due mainly to the Dutch and Javanese influences on Indonesian. Indonesian was also influenced by the Malay trade and creole languages, which was the lingua franca of the archipelago in colonial times, and thus indirectly by other spoken languages of the islands.
Malaysian Malay claims to be closer to the classical Malay of earlier centuries, even though modern Malaysian has been heavily influenced, in lexicon as well as in syntax, by English. The question of whether High Malay or Low Malay was the true parent of the Indonesian language is still debated. High Malay was the official language used in the court of the Johor Sultanate and continued by the Dutch-administered territory of Riau-Lingga, while Low Malay was commonly used in marketplaces and ports of the archipelago. Some linguists have argued that it was the more common Low Malay that formed the base of the Indonesian language.
Old Malay as ''lingua franca''
contacts carried on by various ethnic peoples at the time were the main vehicle for spreading the Old Malay language, which was the main communications medium among the traders. Ultimately, the Old Malay language became a lingua franca and was spoken widely by most people in the archipelago. The beginning of the common era saw the growing influence of Indian civilisation in the archipelago. With the penetration and proliferation of Sanskrit vocabulary and the influence of major Indian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, Ancient Malay evolved into the Old Malay. The oldest uncontroversial specimens of Old Malay are the 7th century CE Sojomerto inscription from Central Java, Kedukan Bukit inscription from South Sumatra, Indonesia and several other inscriptions dating from the 7th to 10th centuries discovered in Sumatra, Java, other islands of the Sunda archipelago, as well as Luzon, Philippines. All these Old Malay inscriptions used either scripts of Indian origin such as Pallava, Nagari or the Indian-influenced old Sumatran characters. The Old Malay system is greatly influenced by Sanskrit scriptures in terms of phonemes, morphemes, vocabulary and the characteristics of scholarship, particularly when the words are closely related to Indian culture. Further research stated that Old Malay and Modern Malay are forms of the same language, in spite of some considerable differences between them.Classical Malay of Riau-Lingga
Standard Indonesian is a standard language of "Riau Malay", which despite its common name is not based on the vernacular Malay dialects of the Riau Islands, but rather represents a form of Classical Malay as used in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the Riau-Lingga Sultanate. Classical Malay had emerged as a literary language in the royal courts along both shores of the Strait of Malacca, including the Johor Sultanate and Malacca Sultanate. The period of Classical Malay started when Islam gained its foothold in the region and the elevation of its status to a state religion. As a result of Islamisation and growth in trade with the Muslim world, this era witnessed the penetration of Arabic and Persian vocabulary as well as the integration of major Islamic cultures with local Malay culture. The earliest instances of Arabic lexicons incorporated in the pre-Classical Malay written in Kawi was found in the Minye Tujoh inscription dated 1380 CE from Aceh in Sumatra. Nevertheless, pre-Classical Malay took on a more radical form more than half a century earlier as attested in the 1303 CE Terengganu Inscription Stone as well as the 1468 CE Pengkalan Kempas Inscription, both from the Malay Peninsula. Both inscriptions not only serve as the evidence of Islam as a state religion but also as the oldest surviving specimen of the dominant classical orthographic form, the Jawi script. Similar inscriptions containing various adopted Arabic terms with some of them still written the Indianised scripts were also discovered in other parts of Sumatra and Borneo.Dutch East Indies Colonial Malay
When the Dutch East India Company first arrived in the archipelago at the start of the 1600s, the Malay language was a significant trading and political language due to the influence of the Malaccan Sultanate and later the Portuguese. However, the language had never been dominant among the population of the Indonesian archipelago as it was limited to mercantile activity. The VOC adopted the Malay language as the administrative language of their trading outpost in the east. Following the bankruptcy of the VOC, the Batavian Republic took control of the colony in 1799, and it was only then that education in and promotion of Dutch began in the colony.The 19th century was the period of strong Western political and commercial domination in the archipelago. The Dutch colonists, realising the importance of understanding the local languages and cultures, began establishing various centres of linguistic, literary and cultural studies in universities like Leiden and London. The use of Latin script began to expand in the fields of administration and education whereby the influence of Dutch literatures and languages started to penetrate and spread gradually into the language.
Even then, Dutch administrators were remarkably reluctant to promote the use of Dutch compared to other colonial regimes. Dutch thus remained the language of a small elite: in 1940, only 2% of the total population could speak Dutch. Nevertheless, it did have a significant influence on the development of Malay in the colony: during the colonial era, the language that would be standardized as Indonesian absorbed a large amount of Dutch vocabulary in the form of loanwords.
The Dutch colonial government recognised the Malacca-Johor Malay used in Riau-Lingga as "High Malay" and promoted it as a medium of communication between the Dutch and local population. The language was also taught in schools not only in Riau but also in East Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan and East Indonesia. In 1864, the Dutch colonial government therefore decided to disseminate this language - and not Dutch - throughout the colony. To this end, the colonial government stimulated the study, standardisation and modernisation of Malay, imposing it via its institutions, via education, the missions and the media, and via the literary works produced by the state publishers Balai Poestaka. In this respect, the Dutch pursued a non-chauvinistic cultural policy. Another catalyst in the movement towards standardization of Malay in Western script was an amalgam of philology and a growing consciousness of an Indies identity such that a "lingua franca" justification for Malay had become insufficient. In reality, Klinkert's pure Malacca or Riau Malay was unusable in the eastern part of Indies even in the coastal regions. In 1910, Sasrasoeganda Koewatin, a prominent Malay language teacher of Kweekschool and OpIeidingschool in Yogyakarta, wrote a Malay grammar book entitled Kitab Jang Menjatakan Djalannja Bahasa Melajoe in which is the first Malay grammar book in Latin script which became the basis for the Indonesian language in use today.