Indonesian

About Indonesian

Indonesian, Bahasa Indonesia, is the official language of Indonesia, a country of more than 17,000 islands and hundreds of local languages. Only about 44 million people speak it as a first language, but about 155 million more use it as a second language, so it is understood almost everywhere in the country. It is a standardized form of Malay.

Indonesian is easy to read aloud: it uses the Latin alphabet with no accents and is spelled as it sounds. c sounds like the ch in "church", and ng is one sound as in "singer". There are no tones and verbs do not change for tense. To be polite, address a man as Bapak (or Pak) and a woman as Ibu (or Bu), and use Anda as a neutral "you".

FamilyAustronesian, Malayic
Native speakersabout 44 million (2010)
Second-language speakersabout 155 million (2010)
Official inIndonesia
ScriptLatin alphabet
Codesid (ISO 639-1), ind (ISO 639-3)

Speaker numbers: Ethnologue (2010), via Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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