Promoting the Southeast Asian languages projects

The Southeast Asian projects^[1] have very low numbers of articles^[2] compared with the population speaking these languages^[3]. Several reasons explain this. This page is for coordinating solutions for these problems and to think out strategies to increase participation, projects and articles.

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The problems

Southeast Asia comprised of ten to twelve^[4] countries with hundreds of local languages. Some languages only spoken within a country's boundaries, while some are spoken in multicountries (such as Malay language). Some languages have national status, while others are only locally used. Some have written lettters/written tradition, majority didn't have any way to write the language. Some written language uses Latin, some uses non-Latin characters, and some borrows from other country's writing system (such as Cia-Cia language of Sulawesi, Indonesia)... Some languages have ISO code, some are not (like map-bms). Some (minor) languages a lot have eager contributors, while some (major languages) have only few. Some languages (for example in Papua island) linguistically fall to Oceanian languages, while geographically may fall into Southeast Asian (West Papua is part of Indonesia, while East Papua is a sovereign state: Papua New Guinea). These complexities and others are reflected through the Wikimedia projects that currently exist or still in incubator.

List of chapters and chapter projects

Wikimedia Indonesia
- Celebrating Knowledge, Friendship, and Wikipedia
- Free Your Knowledge Project 2010
- Beacon of Theology 2011
- Javanese and Sundanese language Wikipedia Revitalization Project
- Wikimedia Cipta
- Meetups
Wikimedia Philippines
- 2010 projects
  - 2010 Philippine Youth Congress in Information Technology
  - 2010 Technological Institute of the Philippines - CITE Week
  - 2010 National Convention on Statistics
- 2011 and future projects
  - Wikipedia Takes Manila (Wikipedia Day 2011)
  - Wikipedia article-writing contest
  - Wikiacademy
  - Rent-a-Textbook
  - The Philippine Encyclopedia (Ensiklopedya Pilipina)
  - Wikipedia Takes the City
  - LGU photography project
- Meetups

List of languages

Listing languages spoken in Southeast Asia can be either by states (political boundaries) or by linguistic families

en:Languages of Southeast Asia (category) according to the sovereign states

en:Languages of Oceania

Languages of Southeast Asia (see also the tree) according to the linguistic classification, which are limited to the languages spoken in Southeast Asian region.^[5]

List of Wikipedia editions

Measures needed to be taken

Discussion

Languages with Wikipedias

Sorted by the number of native speakers. Statistics from List of Wikipedias. Besides mainland SE Asia, maritime SE Asia is an archipelago of about 20.000 islands, and there are hundreds of local languages and dialects in SE Asia region. The languages can be divided by countries and/or major islands. ^[6]

Indonesian

Indonesian is the only national language of Indonesia. Most Indonesian are bilingual or trilingual and acquired Indonesian language as second^[7] "native language" through school, while outside school they use their first mother language (local language with no national status), therefore Indonesian language the language of mass media and academia (i.e. encyclopedia). Indonesian Wikipedia is the biggest SE Asian Wikipedia and mostly edited by Indonesian nationals, partly due to Indonesia as the world's 4th most populous country, and 1st in SE Asia.

Recently as of February 2021, Javanese became the first local language to be afforded an official status in the Yogyakarta province.

Comparison with Indic languages

According to ethnologue report, The number of individual languages listed for India is 452. National or official languages: Hindi and English. 22 official ‘scheduled’ languages: Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Meitei, Nepali, Oriya, Eastern Panjabi, Sanskrit, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu.

Compare to China: The number of individual languages listed for China is 293. National or official languages: Mandarin Chinese, regional languages: Daur, Kalmyk-Oirat, Lu, Peripheral Mongolian, Central Tibetan, Uyghur, Xibe.

Indonesia is the country with the second most individual languages in the world: 726^[8], so much that it needs to be divided by islands: 21 in Java, 74 in Kalimantan, 132 in Maluku Islands, 76 in Bali and Nusa Tenggara Islands, 114 in Sulawesi, 33 in Sumatra, and 276 in Papua.

id:
Number of speakers: Native , Total
565.357 articles (30 March 2021)
People willing to review articles:
People willing to write articles:

Sisters

Wiktionary
Wikibooks
Wikiquote
Wikisource

Local languages of Java

About 21 languages.

Javanese

jv:
Number of speakers: Native 85 mil, Total >85 mil
63.026 articles (30 March 2021)
People willing to review articles:
People willing to write articles:

Sisters

Wiktionary
Wikisource

Javanese Banyumasan

map-bms:
Number of speakers:
13.380 articles (30 March 2021)
People willing to review articles:
People willing to write articles:

Sundanese

su:
Number of speakers: Native 34 mil, Total >34 mil
60.674 articles (30 March 2021)
People willing to review articles:
People willing to write articles:

Sisters

Wiktionary
Wikibooks
Wikiquote
Wikisource

Local languages of Sumatra

About 33 languages.

Malay

Used in Indonesia (esp. in Sumatra), Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore. Some definition list Indonesian language as a Malay variation, but for the purpose of Wikipedia and practicality, it will be differentiated here.^[9] Malay Wikipedia mostly edited by Malaysian nationals even though Indonesian nationals from Sumatra may also have contributions in there.

ms:
Number of speakers: Native 37 mil, Total 180 mil
115656 articles (1 March 2011)
People willing to review articles:
People willing to write articles:

Sisters

Wiktionary
Wikibooks

Acehnese

ace:
Number of speakers: Native 3 mil, Total 3 mil
1500 articles (1 March 2011)
People willing to review articles:
People willing to write articles:

Minang

min:

Nias

nia:

Local languages of Borneo/Kalimantan

About 74 languages.

Banjar

bjn:
Number of speakers:
1093 articles (1 March 2011)
People willing to review articles:
People willing to write articles:

Local languages of Sulawesi

About 114 languages.

Bugis

bug:
Number of speakers: Native 3.5 mil, Total 4.0 mil
5034 articles (1 March 2011)
People willing to review articles:
People willing to write articles:

Gorontalo

gor:

Local languages of Bali and Nusa Tenggara Islands

About 76 languages.

Balinese

ban:

Local languages of Maluku Islands

About 132 languages.

No Wikimedia projects in any of these languages at the moment

Local languages of Papua Island (Indonesian Papua and Papua New Guinea)

About a thousand individual languages. (276 in Indonesian Papua, and 832+ in Papua New Guinea)

No Wikimedia projects in any of these languages at the moment

Tetun

Also spelled Tetum.

tet:
Number of speakers:
497 articles (1 March 2011)
People willing to review articles:
People willing to write articles:

Philippine languages

Tagalog

Bikol

Chavacano

Cebuano

ceb:
Number of speakers: 21 million
6,122,078 articles (30 October 2023)
People willing to review articles:
People willing to write articles:

Capiznon

Hiligaynon

Ilokano

Kinaray-a

Pangasinan

Kapampangan

Tausug

Waray

Languages in Incubator

see Wikipedia Bahasa-bahasa Daerah Indonesia

According to the number of speakers

Madurese (Madura Island, East Java)
Musi (Southern Sumatra)
Betawi (Jakarta, West Java)
Sasak (Lombok Island)
Makasarese (South Sulawesi)
Batak languages: Toba, Dairi, Simalungun, Mandailing, Angkola, Karo (North Sumatra)
and others

Other related languages

Other languages spoken including English (Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines), Chinese (throughout SE Asia), and Portuguese (East Timor).

Resources

Footnotes

↑ The definition used here is: "projects with languages spoken in SE Asian countries with less than 500.000 articles", so English, Chinese, and Dutch doesn't count
↑ about 328,000
↑ about 593,000,000
↑ Officially ten member states of ASEAN plus two observer countries: Timor Leste and Papua New Guinea
↑ quote from en:East_Asian_languages#Linguistic_relationships: "Languages of ... Southeast Asia are classified into multiple language families, many of whose validity continues to be debated:"
↑
See also the division in en:Languages of Asia:
- Malayo-Polynesian languages
  - Borneo–Philippine languages
    - Cebuano
    - Hiligaynon
    - Ilokano
    - Tagalog
  - Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian languages
    - Cham
    - Indonesian
    - Javanese
    - Malay
    - Sundanese
    - Tetum
↑ therefore according to Ethnologue Indonesian has fewer "first-language speakers" than Javanese and Sundanese. The list of 10 largest languages in Indonesia according to Ethnologue: #Javanese, #Sundanese, #Indonesian, #Madurese, #Minangkabau, #Musi, #Banjar, #Acehnese, #Bugis, #Balinese
↑ Papua New Guinea has more than 800 languages
↑ According to en:List of languages by number of native speakers: "Since the definition of a single language is to some extent arbitrary, some mutually intelligible idioms with separate national standards or self-identification have been listed separately, depending on conventional use, including ... Indonesian and Malay....