Betawi language
 |
Betawi language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator |
| Betawi | |
|---|---|
| Bahasa Betawi | |
| Spoken in | Indonesia |
| Region | Jakarta |
| Native speakers | 2.7 million (1993) |
| Language family |
Malay-based creole
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | bew |
Betawi Malay, AKA Jakarta Malay or Java Malay, is the spoken language of the Betawi people in Jakarta, Indonesia. It is the native language of about 2,700,000 people (1993). It is a Malay-based creole, and closely related to Malay language. Betawi vocabulary have large amount of Hokkien Chinese, Arabic, and Dutch loanwords. The first person pronoun gue (I or me) and second person pronoun lu (you) also with numerical such as cepek (a hundred), gopek (five hundred), and seceng (a thousand) clearly demonstrate Hokkien dialect, while the words ente (you) and ane (me) clearly derived from Arabic. It is the ancestor of Cocos Islands Malay.
Today Betawi dialect is a popular informal language in Indonesia and used as the base of Indonesian slang. The name Betawi stems from Batavia, the official name for Jakarta during the era of the Dutch East Indies.
