VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

Indonesian commemorates the Youth Pledge every October 28. One of the legacies of the Youth Pledge is Indonesian as the language that unifies the nation. Language is a characteristic of a country and through language, we can get to know a nation. Indonesian people should be proud as they live in a country that has a unifying language, namely Indonesian.

This pride increased further with the naming of Indonesian language as an official language at the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization or UNESCO on Monday (20/11) at UNESCO Headquarters Paris, France. This determination makes Indonesian the 10th official language recognized
by the UNESCO General Conference, alongside English, Arabic, Mandarin, French, Spanish, Russian, Hindi, Italian and Portuguese.

The establishment of Indonesian as one of the official languages of the UNESCO General Conference certainly strengthens Indonesian on the international stage.

Reporting from detikEdu citing the page of the Language Service Center in Florida, Lingua Edu, in terms of the number of speakers, Indonesian is ranked 10th. Indonesian is also used by more than 275 million speakers. Apart from that, Indonesian has also gone global with the inclusion of the Indonesian language curriculum in 52 countries and there are at least 150,000 foreign speakers who actively speak Indonesian.
 
Apart from being proud, Indonesian is also a challenge for the Indonesian people. Can the Indonesian people glorify and use Indonesian properly and correctly in the midst of globalization and the onslaught of foreign language terms or lingua franca that are widely used in everyday conversations? Of course, Indonesian, like other
languages in the world, is not completely pure and closed from foreign influences.

Hopefully the establishment of Indonesian as the Language of the UNESCO General Conference can have a positive impact on the Indonesian nation and state.