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It’s estimated that about 198 million people in Indonesia speak Indonesian. Less than a quarter of that total, however, speaks Indonesian natively: roughly 42 million. That number is growing, though, as efforts to spread the language are expanded.
- The Most-Spoken Languages
When we count the top 10 most spoken languages according to...
- The Most-Spoken Languages
In 2020, Indonesian had 71.9 million native speakers and 176.5 million second-language speakers, [58] who speak it alongside their local mother tongue, giving a total number of speakers in Indonesia of 248.5 million. [59]
This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. For example, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties, and so they are sometimes considered language families instead.
LanguageFamilyBranchFirst-language (l1) SpeakersEnglish (excl. creole languages)380 millionMandarin Chinese (incl. Standard Chinese, ...941 millionHindi (excl. Urdu)345 millionSpanish (excl. creole languages)486 millionThere 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. [29]
More than 700 Languages Spoken in Indonesia. Indonesians speak hundreds of language. Depending on who is doing the counting they speak 583, 703 or 731 different languages. In one estimate 700 languages are spoken in Irian Jaya alone.
Indonesian is the first language for about 43 million people. These native speakers primarily reside in Indonesia and have grown up using the language in their homes and communities. For these individuals, Indonesian is the primary medium of communication, education, and cultural expression.
There are over 800 languages spoken in Indonesia according to the 2010 census. Other sources consider several of these to be dialects of the same language, and show the number of unique languages being closer to 700.
