Indonesian

Indonesian, called bahasa Indonesia by its speakers, is the official and national language of Indonesia. It is a standardized variety of Malay, an Austronesian language that served as a lingua franca across the multilingual Indonesian archipelago for centuries before it became the language of the modern state. Its sources describe it as the largest language of Southeast Asia by number of speakers, with more than 97 percent of Indonesians reporting fluency in it at the 2020 census, while most citizens also speak one of more than 700 local languages at home. It is written in the Latin script. For this atlas its interest lies in the religious vocabulary it has absorbed: Sanskrit, kept in high esteem because it carried the Hindu and Buddhist traditions of the islands, supplies many learned terms, and Arabic supplies the words for the Bible and the Gospel, Alkitab and Injil, as well as words used in Christian and Islamic practice alike. Standard Indonesian is used for formal education, government and national media.