What Is Indonesian?
Indonesian is a 20th century name for Malay. Depending on how you define a language and how you count its number of speakers, today Malay-Indonesian ranks around sixth or seventh in size among the world’s languages. With dialect variations it is spoken by more than 200 million people in the modern states of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei. It is also an important vernacular in the southern provinces of Thailand, in East Timor and among the Malay people of Australia’s Cocos Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean. It is understood in parts of the Sulu area of the southern Philippines and traces of it are to be found among people of Malay descent in Sri Lanka, South Africa and other places. Malay is just one of many scores, perhaps hundreds, of different languages in the area now occupied by the Republic of Indonesia. In 1928 the Indonesian nationalist movement chose it as the future nation’s national language. Its name was changed to Bahasa Indonesia, literally: “the language (bah
