Indonesia Conference Directory

Western Europe nations, and especially France, have erased most of their regional languages in the past two centuries, in an effort to improve national unity. Fortunately, Indonesia did not make the same mistake; the national language, Indonesian, ensures the cohesion of the nation, and the 668 regional languages do not represent any danger for the unity of the Republic of Indonesia. Local regional languages of Indonesia, with fewer than 1,000 speakers are obviously in danger of extinction in Indonesia as elsewhere in the world. But, in the long run, Indonesias "big" regional languages are also threatened, due to the urbanization and mixing of the population. In schematization, the strongest regional languages in Indonesia have less than one million speakers, and more than 100,000.