Pualam Abadi speaking Indonesian

Pualam Abadi speaks Indonesian, or Bahasa Indonesia, a language spoken primarily in Indonesia. It belongs to the Austronesian language family, and related to Indigenous Indonesian languages in Borneo and Sumatra.

This video was self-recorded by Pualam Abadi in Semarang, Indonesia. As a standard variant of Riau Malay, Bahasa Indonesia is the native tongue of 42.8 million speakers throughout Indonesia and is used by nearly 200 million diasporic speakers worldwide. The number of speakers grew following Indonesia’s independence in 1945, when it was chosen as the nation’s one official language.

Bahasa Indonesia, while part of the Austronesian language family, contains many loanwords from languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Mandarian, Arabic, Portuguese, and Dutch. There is some mutual intelligibility between the standard variants of Bahasa Indonesia and the language Bahasa Malaysia, but intelligibility between local variants is more limited due to regional variation.

Due to its official status, most education, media, and government proceedings are conducted in Standard Indonesian. However, many other dialects of Indonesian exist on a local level, and there are more than 700 indigenous languages also spoken nationally. Historically, Bahasa Indonesian was neither the native language spoken by most of the population or by its European occupier; it was, however, the commonly used language of commerce and by Christian missionaries, making it known to many different linguistic communities in the Indonesian archipelago.

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