This article is hyperbolic and opinionated at best, and ignorant at worst. A vast majority of the country speaks Bahasa Indonesia as either a first or second la

This article is hyperbolic and opinionated at best, and ignorant at worst. A vast majority of the country speaks Bahasa Indonesia as either a first or second language. You have to go to very remote villages to find people who don’t speak it. The author’s idea that Indonesians have other “options” of languages to speak if they don’t like Bahasa Indonesia is also laughable. People will generally know their own particular ethnic language, and may choose to speak it when they are only around others who speak it too, in the home for instance. But people rarely elect to learn a second local language that they didn’t grow up speaking. Bahasa Indonesia is used very widely, partly because the opportunity to use local languages is quite restricted, especially in cities, where the populations are much more diverse. Regions tend to have their own localised slang, but I think that’s true everywhere in the world.