Btw, I have the feeling that this is also a case about Malaysia counted Indonesian's culture as part of theirs. Example of the tari pendet, wayang kulit, batik disputes give me this negative thinking.
That will be strange given that the ones having those culture are not ethnically Malay.
Actually many years ago Indonesians also thought that Malaysia should be theirs; I have heard that there are "Eat-up Malaysia" propaganda during Sukarno times.
Meanwhile this topic is titled Malay language (Bahasa Melayu) and sub title Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia. say something? 
Linking Malay to Bahasa Indonesia is perhaps like linking one of Mandarin language source to Mandarin. Bahasa Indonesia is sources is also included Javanese,arab,chinese,dutch and many more languages as its sources.
The main source of Indonesian is actually Malay with others having much smaller proportions.
Just like main source of standard Mandarin is Beijing Mandarin (even though you find Wu words and classical words in it and it doesn't include some of the native Beijing words).
here is another link about most spoken language. http://www.photius.c...languages2.html
Well, that depends on whether you only count native speakers or you also count second-language speakers.
If second-language speakers were counted, perhaps English should be more than Mandarin, and Indonesian would have around 200 million total speakers.
Not sure, though, whether Malay will rank no4 after considering it.
If you combine Malaysian and Indonesian populations together (assuming they speak national language), it will be just above the Arabic as it seems that most of the Arab speakers are natively Arabic.
Some populations in Indonesia and Malaysia may not be able to speak national language, though I am also not sure if they will be counted in censuses.
Edited by qrasy, 02 November 2009 - 10:13 PM.
