Javanese Language - Demographic Distribution of Javanese Speakers

Demographic Distribution of Javanese Speakers

See also: Javanese people

Javanese is spoken throughout Indonesia, neighboring Southeast Asian countries, the Netherlands, Suriname, New Caledonia, and other countries. The largest populations of speakers are found in the six provinces of Java itself, and in the neighboring Sumatran province of Lampung.

A table showing the number of native speakers in 1980, for the 22 Indonesian provinces (from the total of 27) in which more than 1% of the population spoke Javanese:

Indonesian province % of provincial population Javanese speakers (1980)
1. Aceh province 6.7% 175,000
2. North Sumatra 21.0% 1,757,000
3. West Sumatra 1.0% 56,000
4. Jambi 17.0% 245,000
5. South Sumatra 12.4% 573,000
6. Bengkulu 15.4% 118,000
7. Lampung 62.4% 2,886,000
8. Riau 8.5% 184,000
9. Jakarta 3.6% 236,000
10. West Java 13.3% 3,652,000
11. Central Java 96.9% 24,579,000
12. Yogyakarta 97.6% 2,683,000
13. East Java 74.5% 21,720,000
14. Bali 1.1% 28,000
15. West Kalimantan 1.7% 41,000
16. Central Kalimantan 4.0% 38,000
17. South Kalimantan 4.7% 97,000
18. East Kalimantan 10.1% 123,000
19. North Sulawesi 1.0% 20,000
20. Central Sulawesi 2.9% 37,000
21. Southeast Sulawesi 3.6% 34,000
22. Maluku 1.1% 16,000

According to the 1980 census, Javanese was used daily in approximately 43% of Indonesian households. By this reckoning there were well over 60 million Javanese speakers, from a national population of 147,490,298.

In Banten, Western Java, the descendants of the Central Javanese conquerors who founded the Islamic Sultanate there in the 16th century still speak an archaic form of Javanese. The rest of the population mainly speaks Sundanese and Indonesian, since this province borders directly on Jakarta.

At least one third of the population of Jakarta are of Javanese descent, so they speak Javanese or have knowledge of it. In the province of West Java, many people speak Javanese, especially those living in the areas bordering Central Java, the cultural homeland of the Javanese.

Almost a quarter of the population of East Java province are Madurese (mostly on the Isle of Madura); many Madurese have some knowledge of colloquial Javanese. Since the 19th century, Madurese was also written in the Javanese script.

The original inhabitants of Lampung, the Lampungese, make up only 15% of the provincial population. The rest are the so-called "transmigrants", settlers from other parts of Indonesia, many as a result of past government transmigration programs. Most of these transmigrants are Javanese who have settled there since the 19th century.

In Suriname (the former Dutch colony of Surinam), South America, approximately 15% of the population of some 500,000 are of Javanese descent, among whom 75,000 speak Javanese. A local variant evolved: the Tyoro Jowo-Suriname or Suriname Javanese.

Read more about this topic:  Javanese Language

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