Austronesian · ISO 639-3 bug
Buginese Language ᨅᨔ ᨕᨘᨁᨗ
Buginese is an Austronesian language spoken by about 5.0 million people in 2 countries. It is written in the Latin and Buginese scripts.
Where Buginese is spoken
- Official language
- Regional official
- Spoken by 10%+
- 1–10%
- Smaller communities
About the Buginese language
Buginese (ᨅᨔ ᨕᨘᨁᨗ) is spoken by about 5.0 million people, which makes it the 185th most spoken language in the world — just behind Hadrami Arabic (5.1 million) and ahead of Ghanaian Pidgin English (5.0 million). It belongs to the Austronesian language family and, more precisely, to the Bugis group within the Greater South Sulawesi branch.
Where is Buginese spoken?
Buginese is used in 2 countries. The largest communities live in Indonesia (4.5 million) and Malaysia (27,306).
Share of the population that speaks Buginese: Indonesia 1.6% (4.5 million) and Malaysia <0.1% (27,306).
Buginese is not a national official language anywhere.
Writing system and status
Buginese is written in the Latin and Buginese scripts. It is a safe, widely transmitted language: children still learn it at home as their first language.
Its closest relatives in the same branch of the family are Makasar.
ISO codes: ISO 639-3 bug.
Frequently asked questions about Buginese
How many people speak Buginese?
Where is Buginese spoken?
What language family does Buginese belong to?
What is Buginese called in Buginese?
Is Buginese an endangered language?
Data: Languages of the World dataset (MIT) — ISO 639-3, Glottolog (CC BY 4.0), Unicode CLDR, Google LinguaMeta (CC BY 4.0) and Wikidata; country lists: samayo/country-json (MIT). Speaker numbers include first- and second-language speakers where sources report them.