Language and Script
The national language is Indonesian, a close relative of Malaysian, the national language of Malaysia. Indonesian is now widely used in all social situations and, generally speaking, has pushed the other languages of Indonesia (about 250 different languages and an equal number of dialects which are spoken as first languages) into the role of merely regional, provincial languages.
Ethnic and linguistic borders generally coincide.Both Indonesian and Malaysian are dialects of Malay which used to be the lingua franca of the archipelago and which was of considerable importance in the spreading of Islam throughout the area. Lexically, Malay began to grow in different directions only as a result of colonial influences when, following the Treaty of London (1824), the Malay Peninsula and the archipelago became divided into, respectively, a British and a Dutch region of dominance. Today, the governments of both Indonesia and Malaysia are concerned to bring the two languages closer together again.
Linguistically, Malay which is the mother tongue of only about 5 per cent of the population, belongs to the western branch of the Austronesian language family. This group of languages (once called Malayo-Polynesian) stretches across the Indian Ocean and the Pacific from Madagascar to the Easter Islands and includes the languages of the Philippines as well as some of the languages of Formosa and mainland South-east Asia, for example, that of the Cham, an isolated group of Muslims living in present-day Cambodia and Vietnam. The vast majority of languages and dialects spoken in Indonesia also belong to the same western or Indonesian branch of the Austronesian language family.
In the past, not many of these languages developed their own systems of writing. Generally only those ethnic groups which formed states in the course of their history acquired scripts and their own written, literary traditions.
However, not all Indonesian ethnic groups with a script have left a written heritage as rich as that of the Javanese, Balinese, Malays, Buginese and Macassarese. Non-Islamic texts of a religious nature appear prominently among some, such as the Balinese and the Batak. A major part of the indigenous texts was written on perishable materials such as palm-leaf or locally produced paper, hence surviving copies are of a fairly recent date and not older than a few centuries. Nevertheless, some of the texts can be traced to a much earlier time, reaching as far back as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Epigraphy tends to go back further and we have been left with inscriptions on stone dating back to the fourth century CE.Indian scripts and other locally developed variants of those scripts were widely in use prior to the arrival of Islam and the introduction of Jawi, as the modified Arabic script which is close to its Persian variant is generally called. Nowadays, only the Islamic Javanese and their close cousins the Hinduistic Balinese still employ on occasion their own Indic scripts when using their regional languages, Javanese and Balinese. Of the two groups, at least the Javanese were familiar with the Arabic script, which they called pegon and which was used almost exclusively in the context of Islamic learning. Macassarese and Buginese, too, preserved their own Indic-derived script after the arrival of Islam. However, unlike the Javanese and Balinese, that script has not been much used in recent times.
Today the Latin script is officially and commonly in use although, until only a few decades ago and prior to the introduction of a (secular) public education, the writing ofjawi was a more common skill. This skill did not, however, receive the recognition of the Dutch colonial authorities and only those able to read and write the Latin script were officially considered to be literate.