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The Austronesian peoples refer to people sometimes referred to as Austronesian-speaking peoples, [44] and are meant to refer to a large group of peoples from places such as Taiwan, Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Micronesia, coastal New Guinea, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar that speak languages that have been categorized by some as Austronesian languages.
There are more than 600 ethnic groups [1] in the multicultural Indonesian archipelago, making it one of the most diverse countries in the world. The vast majority of these belong to the Austronesian peoples, concentrated in western and central Indonesia (), with a sizable minority are Melanesian peoples concentrated in eastern Indonesia ().
Native Indonesians, also known as Pribumi (lit. ' first on the soil ') or Bumiputra (lit. ' son on the soil '), are Indonesians whose ancestral roots lie mainly in the archipelago, comprising around 1,300 ethnic groups and predominantly of Austronesian and Melanesian descent.
Map showing the distribution of language families; the pink color shows where Austronesian languages are spoken. This is a list of major and official Austronesian languages, a language family originating from Taiwan, that is widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia (Indonesia and Philippines) and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia and Madagascar.
With more than 100 million people, [20] Javanese people are the largest ethnic group in both Indonesia and in Southeast Asia as a whole. Their native language is Javanese, it is the largest of the Austronesian languages in number of native speakers and also the largest regional language in Southeast Asia. [21]
The Bugis people, also known as Buginese, are an Austronesian ethnic group—the most numerous of the three major linguistic and ethnic groups of South Sulawesi (the others being Makassarese and Torajan), in the south-western province of Sulawesi, third-largest island of Indonesia. The Bugis in 1605 converted to Islam from Animism. [5]
Austronesian people form the majority of the modern population. They may have arrived in Indonesia around 2000 BCE and are thought to have originated in Taiwan. [29] During this period, parts of Indonesia participated in the Maritime Jade Road, with outlets in Kalimantan which existed for 3,000 years between 2000 BCE to 1000 CE.
Most Austronesian languages are spoken by island dwellers. Only a few languages, such as Malay and the Chamic languages, are indigenous to mainland Asia. Many Austronesian languages have very few speakers, but the major Austronesian languages are spoken by tens of millions of people. For example, Indonesian is spoken by around 197.7 million people.