The Indonesian language, also known as Bahasa Indonesia, originated from Malay, an Austronesian language that served as the lingua franca of the region for centuries. It is a distant relative of the Polynesian languages.

About 97% of Indonesians speak Indonesian, although many are bilingual or even multilingual. Most Indonesians grow up speaking one of roughly 700 local languages as their first tongue, while Indonesian functions as a unifying national language. The total number of speakers is estimated at 248 million, making it one of the ten most widely spoken languages in the world.

Indonesian has no grammatical genders—for example, the word dia can mean either “he” or “she.”

Plurals work differently than in English. For instance, buku means “book,” while buku-buku means “books.”

Regional languages such as Javanese and Sundanese have shaped Indonesian, along with many foreign languages including Dutch, Arabic, Sanskrit, Portuguese, and English.

Indonesian officially adopted the Latin script in 1928, and later spelling reforms established clear pronunciation rules that rarely deviate.

During World War II, Imperial Japan, while occupying Indonesia, banned the use of Dutch but instead promoted Indonesian.

Indonesian and modern Malay are mutually intelligible, though they feature notable differences, including “false friends.”

Former U.S. President Barack Obama spent part of his childhood in Indonesia due to his stepfather’s work and learned some Indonesian, although he is not fluent.

Some words resemble English but have very different meanings:

air means “water,”

cat means “paint,”

crap means “absorb,”

juice means “just.”