Nusantara Language and Literature

Helloindonesia.id – Indonesia is a country with hundreds or even thousands of regional languages, but actually where does Indonesian itself come from or where Indonesian can enter this country.

Nusantara language and literature were included in the Malay-Polynesian group in the Austronesian family and into the Papuan group. Both with the explanatory pattern “Wallacea-Weber” and with the pattern of the explanation for the development of the Archipelago kingdoms, we can observe how language was formed along with the spread of humans. Both knowledge, technology, and literature are then formed in the distribution.

There are around 746 regional languages ​​in the archipelago (according to the Ministry of Education and Culture Language Center). Most of these languages ​​are summarized in literary works so that people can learn the sources of writing or through conversation (included in fochlor). Some others are studied with symbols that appear in buildings or landmarks.

Hundreds of these languages ​​present the uniqueness of the archipelago in a sense, including:

The distribution of community groups in the archipelago occurred in waves. Malay speakers gain access to Malay language and literature through royal development and commerce. This includes developments in each tribe, for example, which occur in Acehnese, Minangkabau, and Palembang languages. This distribution is also accessed by developing tribes in Eastern Indonesia, such as Bugis, Makassar and Nusa Tenggara.
Independent languages, which are completely alien to other speakers, reflect that the community of speakers lives in minimal interaction with other tribes, and by assuming that their livelihood situations make it possible to live in this pattern. This can be found for example in Papua and East Nusa Tenggara.
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In the Nusantara languages, we find the characters “hard” and “weak” (as in German), for example found in Muna. Also, we find tense or character of time and conjugation (subject-predicate), for example we find in Muna.
Nusantara languages ​​also directly interact with world languages. We find language interactions between Javanese and Sanskrit, and Bugis-Makassar with Arabic, Malay with Arabic, or Indonesian Betawi dialect with Mandarin and Cantonese.
Implicit in the foregoing, Nusantara languages ​​continue to follow the speakers’ movements and interact, with or without Indonesian — on the contrary, Indonesian takes on the role of lingua franca and standard language in the education and government space.

At the same time, the lack of research and preservation of these Nusantara languages ​​made some of these languages ​​on the verge of extinction, the number even reaching around 50 languages. This is also related to the speakers who are less than 500 people, and most of them are also old.