Dyslexia in Indonesia: An Overview

While our understanding of dyslexia has grown in the past decades, in many non-English-speaking parts of the world, research on dyslexia is still in its infancy (Lee, 2008). Indonesia is not an exception: As one of the most populous countries on earth behind China, India, and the United States, research on dyslexia in Indonesia is relatively scarce. Standard Indonesian (SI) is the language where most research on assessment is conducted. To start with, Standard Indonesian is a member of the Western Malayo-Polynesian subdivision of the Austronesian language family. First-language SI speakers are relatively few in number despite its status as the statutory national language, and this is because the vast majority of Indonesians first learn to speak regional dialects/languages at home and only acquire SI through formal education. To put this in perspective, of the 270 or so million population, between 23 million and 43 million are L1 speakers of Indonesian compared to over 84 million L1 speakers of Javanese, a regional language that is mainly spoken in the island of Java. Outside of the widely spoken regional languages such as Javanese and Sundanese, Indonesians use one of the hundreds of languages spoken in Indonesia, most of which are not at all intelligible to an L1 SI speaker, some which are close to extinction and have less than 100 speakers. In some (especially rural) areas, older generations may have limited competence in SI.