Indonesian · Bahasa Indonesia

About Indonesian

Language family

Austronesian, Malayic branch

Where it's spoken

Indonesia

Speakers

over 200 million speakers, mostly as a second language, with about 43 million native speakers

Indonesian is a standardized form of Malay, adopted as the unifying national language when Indonesia became independent in 1945 specifically because it was nobody's dominant ethnic mother tongue — a deliberate choice to avoid favoring Javanese or another large local language. It remains close enough to standard Malay that speakers of each can generally understand the other. Its Austronesian relatives stretch from Madagascar to the Pacific, including Tagalog and Malagasy.