Languages of Indonesia

Indonesia is home to over 700 living languages spoken across its extensive archipelago. This significant linguistic variety constitutes approximately 10% of the world’s total languages, positioning Indonesia as the second most linguistically diverse nation globally, following Papua New Guinea. The majority of these languages belong to the Austronesian language family, prevalent in the western and central regions of Indonesia, including languages such as Acehnese, Sundanese, and Buginese. In contrast, the eastern regions, particularly Papua and the Maluku Islands, are home to over 270 Papuan languages, which are distinct from the Austronesian family and represent a unique linguistic heritage. The language most widely spoken as a native language is Javanese, primarily by the Javanese people in the central and eastern parts of Java Island, as well as across many other islands due to migration.
Languages in Indonesia are classified into nine categories: national language, locally used indigenous languages, regional lingua francas, foreign and additional languages, heritage languages, languages in the religious domain, English as a lingua franca, and sign languages.
The official language of Indonesia is Indonesian (locally known as bahasa Indonesia), a standardised form of Malay, which serves as the lingua franca of the archipelago. According to the 2020 census, over 97% of Indonesians are fluent in Indonesian. The vocabulary of Indonesian borrows heavily from regional languages of Indonesia, such as Javanese, Sundanese and Minangkabau, as well as from Dutch, Sanskrit, Portuguese, Arabic and more recently English. The Indonesian language is primarily used in commerce, administration, education and the media, and thus nearly every Indonesian speaks the language to varying degrees of proficiency. Most Indonesians speak other languages, such as Javanese, as their first language. This makes plurilingualism a norm in Indonesia.
Indonesia recognizes only a single national language, and indigenous languages are recognized at the regional level, although policies vary from one region to another. For example, in the Special Region of Yogyakarta, the Javanese language is the region's official language along with Indonesian. Javanese is the most spoken indigenous language, with native speakers constituting 31.8% of the total population of Indonesia (as of 2010). Javanese speakers are predominantly located in the central to eastern parts of Java, and there are also sizable numbers in most provinces. The next most widely spoken regional languages in the country are Sundanese, local Malay, Madurese and Minangkabau. A sense of Indonesian nationhood exists alongside strong regional identities.
There are hundreds of indigenous languages spoken in Indonesia. Most of them are locally used indigenous languages, a category of languages referring to those spoken at the local, regional level, spoken by a small number of people, ranging from a few to a few thousands of people. These include small languages such as Benggoi, Mombum and Towei. Other languages are spoken at the regional level to connect various ethnicities. For this reason, these languages are known as regional lingua francas (RLFs). According to Subhan Zein, there are at least 43 RLFs in Indonesia, categorized into two types: Malayic RLFs and Non-Malayic RLFs. The former refers to a group of regional lingua francas that are thought of as indigenised varieties of Malay or Indonesian. These include such languages as Ambon Malay, Banjarese and Papuan Malay. The latter refers to regional lingua francas that are not associated with Malay or Indonesian, including Biak, Iban and Onin.
As early as the seventh century AD, the natives of the archipelago began an intense period of trade with people from China, India and other countries. This was followed by a long period of colonization by the Dutch and Portugal colonials. The outcome of these processes has been the development of a group of heritage languages spoken by Arab, Chinese, Eurasian and Dutch descendants, among others. Chinese linguistic varieties such as Hokkien, Hakka, and Mandarin are the most common heritage languages. Tamil is also spoken among majority of Indians in the country. A small number of heritage language speakers speak Arabic and Dutch.
Despite the Dutch presence in Indonesia for almost 350 years (parts of Indonesia were ruled by the Dutch East India Company and the whole of modern Indonesia was in the Dutch East Indies) the Dutch language has no official status in Indonesia. The small minority that can speak the language fluently are either educated members of the oldest generation, or employed in the legal profession, as certain law codes are still only available in Dutch.
English has historically been categorized as the first foreign language in Indonesia. However, increasing exposure to English, the decreasing influence of native-speaker norms in the country and the prevalent use of English as a lingua franca in the broader context such as ASEAN means that the categorization has been put into question. Scholars such as Lowenberg argue that English is best seen as an additional language. Meanwhile, Zein argues that English in Indonesia is best categorized as a lingua franca, an argument parallel with Kirkpatrick's contention on the use of English as a lingua franca in the broader ASEAN context.
Other languages, such as Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Portuguese and Spanish, are non-native to Indonesia. These languages are included in the educational curriculum and may be categorized as either foreign or additional languages, depending on the instrumental function of the languages, length and types of exposure, as well as the wide-ranging motivations of the speakers or learners who use and or learn them.
There are 726 languages spoken across the Indonesian archipelago in 2009 (dropped from 742 languages in 2007), the second largest multilingual population in the world after Papua New Guinea. Indonesian Papua, which is adjacent to Papua New Guinea, has the most languages in Indonesia. Based on the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale classification used by Ethnologue (formerly the Summer Institute of Linguistics), 63 languages are dying (shown in red on the bar chart, subdivided into Moribund and Nearly Extinct, or Dormant), which is defined as "The only fluent users (if any) are older than child-bearing age."
Indonesia's national language policy is governed by various legal frameworks. Article 36C of the 1945 Constitution mandates that matters related to the national flag, language, emblem, and anthem must be regulated by law. This mandate led to the enactment of Law No. 24 of 2009 on the National Flag, Language, Emblem, and Anthem, which dedicates Chapter III (Articles 25–45) to the regulation of the Indonesian language.
In addition to regulating the national language, the government has implemented a Regional Language Revitalization Program (Revitalisasi Bahasa Daerah (RBD)), which aims to preserve and promote local languages by ensuring their transmission to younger generations. To support this initiative, the ministry has published Guidelines for Regional Language Revitalization (Pedoman Model Revitalisasi Bahasa Daerah), providing a structured approach for implementation across different regions.
Indonesia is home to 718 regional languages, many of which are classified as endangered or critically endangered. The revitalization efforts are part of a broader strategy to maintain linguistic diversity while reinforcing the role of Indonesian as the national language.
The population numbers given below are of native speakers, excepting the figure for Indonesian, which counts its total speakers. The total population of the country was 237.6 million in 2010.
Several prominent languages spoken in Indonesia sorted by language family are:
There are many additional small families and isolates among the Papuan languages.
Below is a full list of Papuan language families spoken in Indonesia, following Palmer, et al. (2018):
There are at least 2.5 million sign language users across the country, although official report only shows less than 50,000. Sign language users are often ridiculed and stigmatized.
Indonesian languages are generally not rendered in native-invented systems, but in scripts devised by speakers of other languages, that is, Tamil, Arabic, and Latin. Malay, for example, has a long history as a written language and has been rendered in Brahmic, Arabic, and Latin scripts. Javanese has been written in the Pallava script of South India, as well as their derivative (known as Kawi and Javanese), in an Arabic alphabet called pegon that incorporates Javanese sounds, and in the Latin script.
Chinese characters have never been used to write Indonesian languages, although Indonesian place-names, personal names, and names of trade goods appear in reports and histories written for China's imperial courts.
The following texts are translations of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the languages of Indonesia.
Below is a chart of several Indonesian languages. All of them except for Galela belong to the Austronesian language family. While there have been misunderstandings on which ones should be classified as languages and which ones should be classified as dialects, the chart confirms that many have similarities, yet are not mutually comprehensible. The languages are arranged geographically.