Speakers and Geographic Distribution
Indonesian has 23 million native speakers. Around 140,000,000 speakers use it as a second language alongside their local mother tongue. It is used extensively as a first language by Indonesians in urban areas, and as a second language by those residing in more rural parts of Indonesia.
The VOA and BBC use Indonesian as their standard for broadcasting in Malay. Indonesian is 80% cognate with Malaysian. In Australia, Indonesian is one of three Asian target languages, together with Japanese and Mandarin, taught in some of schools as part of the Languages Other Than English programme.
Read more about this topic: Indonesian Language
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)