Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) is the official and national language of Indonesia, adopted at independence in 1945. It is a standardised register of Malay, itself a member of the Austronesian language family that spread across maritime Southeast Asia over thousands of years. Malay had long served as a trade lingua franca throughout the Indonesian archipelago, making it a natural choice for a unifying national language. While Indonesian is spoken as a first language by only around 20% of the population, nearly the entire country of 270 million uses it as a second language for education, government, media, and inter-ethnic communication. Indonesia is home to over 700 distinct regional languages — among the highest linguistic diversity of any nation on Earth — including Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, and hundreds of smaller tongues. The national motto 'Bhinneka Tunggal Ika' (Unity in Diversity) reflects this extraordinary multilingual heritage.
