Speakers and geographic distribution

Indonesian has 23 million native speakers. Around 140,000,000 speakers use it as a second language^[3] alongside their local mother tongue. It is used extensively as a first language by Indonesians in urban areas, and as a second language by those residing in more rural parts of Indonesia.
The VOA and BBC use Indonesian as their standard for broadcasting in Malay.^[4][5] Indonesian is 80% cognate with Malaysian.^[3] In Australia, Indonesian is one of three Asian target languages, together with Japanese and Mandarin, taught in some of schools as part of the Languages Other Than English programme