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Donna speaking Minangkabau

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CC BY-NC 4.0

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This video was recorded by Fiel Sahir in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where he and Donna met at a Polyglot Indonesia Jakarta meetup event. Minangkabau is spoken by more than 5 million people, principally in the Indonesian province of West Sumatra, where it is a regionally official language, and neighboring North Sumatra, where it functions as a lingua franca between a diverse array of communities. It is also spoken in parts of Malaysia, especially the state of Negeri Sembilan, where it is also official and sometimes referred to as a local variety of Malay. Minangkabau is a dialectically diverse language, with significant differences emerging between different towns and cities. This diversity is also manifest in the language’s written form: Minangkabau speakers do not use a single literary standard. An Austronesian language of the Malayo-Polynesian family, Minangkabau is closely related to Malay, as well as Balinese, Indonesian, and a myriad of mother tongues. It is the mother tongue of the eponymously identifying Minangkabau people, who are among Indonesia’s matrilineal societies. They are also known internationally for their traditional ‘rumah gadang’ or ‘big house’ architecture, defined by dramatically curved roof structures.

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