MINISTER HANDS RI'S LINGUISTIC MAP TO PRESIDENT

Bandung, May 26 (ANTARA) - National Education Minister Bambang Sudibyo presented a newly-composed map of 442 regional tongues existing in Indonesia to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono at a ceremony here Tuesday.

The map was handed to the president on the occasion of National Education Day as an official document attesting to the nation's linguistic wealth and diversity.

Sudibyo said at the ceremony held at the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) Indonesia was endowed with an invaluable cultural and linguistic diversity.
"Studies conducted in 2,815 regions have shown Indonesia has no fewer than 442 regional languages," he said.

Most Indonesians, he said, were born into bilingual social environments where they learned to speak their mother tongue and Bahasa Indonesia, the national language.
"The regional language is in many parts of the country the mother tongue but some of the regional languages have now begun to be threatened by extinction as a result of globalization," he said.

Meanwhile, the head of the education ministry's Linguistic Center, Dr Dendy Sugondo, said on the occasion, the map of Indonesia's regional languages had taken as long as 15 years to compose because the field work to collect the data on mother tongues across the country was often hampered by geographical constraints.
The studies on regional languages or mother tongues were conducted to inventorize and document the Indonesian people's languages as forms of their cultures, and thereby create a means to help defend the concept of the unitary state of the Republic of Indonesia, he said.

"So, as a result of these studies, Indonesia now does not only have a territorial map but also a linguistic map," he said.

Sugondo said the studies had also shown that six regional languages or mother tongues had now become almost extinct. These languages were once widely spoken in parts of East Nusatenggara, Papua, and Maluku. At present each of the six languages was still being used by only less than 100 people.