The article The future of Indonesian discusses the development of the world's most popular languages today and how it affects the presence and role of Indonesian in the global community. The article starts by discussing the five most popular languages in the world, as of 2021, based on statistics from UNESCO and reviews the factors that led to them becoming the most popular languages in the world. The two things that make a language the most popular are the number of speakers (e.g. Mandarin, Hindi and English) and the role it plays in the global community (e.g. English being the most used language on websites).

The use of English is certainly not limited to the language of internet content but is also a lingua franca, a language of instruction, for the world of business, education, and science for people of different languages and nations. This condition makes English occupy a hegemonic status that everyone must accept. However, there are still opportunities for other languages to take on other roles such as Mandarin becoming the language with the highest number of native speakers, Spanish becoming the national language in many South American countries, and Indonesian becoming the fifth most used language on the internet.

In November 2023, Indonesians experienced a surge of pride when news broke that UNESCO had made Indonesian an official language at the UNESCO congress (Yani and Harahap, 2023). Based on country of origin, Indonesians are in 5th place for the most internet users, 224 million people (Statista, 2024).

Indonesian can rank fifth because the Satista report (2021) shows that Indonesians are the number three internet users, after the US and India. Based on speakers, Ethnologue found that there are 199 million people who use Indonesian in life. This is the potential for Indonesian to match the popularity of Mandarin and Hindi. In addition to the Indonesian population in the world, the development of Indonesian needs to be encouraged by campaigning for Indonesian as one of the official languages in international organizations, publishing international journals or proceedings in Indonesian, and continuing the Indonesian Language for Foreign Speakers (BIPA) program at home and abroad.

(Todo F.B. Sibuea, S.Pd., M.Hum.)
Ketua Program S1 Studi Sastra Inggris

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