Page 177 - THE MELANESIA DIASPORA FILE CETAK ISI 10022017

Tabel 1. The Comparison of Number of Population and Languages in Indonesia. Source: Imelda
(2010: 1)
Location Sumatera Java & Bali Kalimantan Nusa Sulawesi Maluku Papua
Tenggara
Number of 43,309,707 123,573,000 11,331,558 7,961,540 14,111,444 2,549,454 2,220,934
population
Number of 33 20 74 76 114 128 274
languages

The table shows that there is not a straight comparison between the total population
and the number of languages. Indonesia’s western region has a high population but
few languages while the eastern part of Indonesia has low population but quite many
languages. The languages that are spoken in the western part of Indonesia are from
the Austronesian language family while many of the languages spoken in the eastern
Indonesian region belong to the non-Austronesian language family, except languages in
the southern Halmahera.
In Nusa Tenggara, there are 76 languages (with a population of 7,961,540 people)
Sulawesi has 114 languages (with population of 14,111,444 people) Maluku has 128
languages (with a population of 2,549,454 people) and Papua has 274 languages (with
population of 2,220,934 people). Thus, the farther to the east region of Indonesia, the
more the number of languages whereas the number of people are few. This means that a
lot of languages are only spoken by a few speakers. Such a condition is highly unfavorable
for these languages.

Melanesia
The previous description has shown that Melanesia is included in the Austronesian language
group and specifically included in the classification of East Polynesian-Malay. But a French
explorer, Jules d’Urville in 1812 used the term Melanesia for ractial types among ethnic
groups in Polynesia, the Micronesian Islands and the Melanesian islands. Additionally,
Jules d’Urville considered Malaysia as an area that extends from the western Pacific to the
Arafuru Sea and to the north and northeast of Australia. In this case, Melanesia is used to
refer to a geographical region. Thus, Melanesia may refer to several things: a geographical
region, race, culture and language.

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