Indonesia and Jakarta in 90 languages: names and the 38 provinces

Where the name Indonesia comes from

Indonesia is a nineteenth-century coinage from India and the Greek nēsos, island. In 1850 the English ethnologist George Windsor Earl proposed Indunesians and Malayunesians for the people of the Indian or Malay Archipelago and preferred the second. In the same journal James Richardson Logan took up Indonesia as a geographical term.

The German ethnographer Adolf Bastian gave the word scholarly weight in the title of a five-volume work on the islands of the Malay Archipelago, published between 1884 and 1894. Dutch scholars long kept to Malay Archipelago or Netherlands East Indies. After 1900 the name spread among Indonesian nationalists; Soewardi Soerjaningrat, later Ki Hajar Dewantara, opened a press bureau with Indonesia in its name in The Hague in November 1918.

Because the name was built from Greek and Latin parts, most languages borrowed it whole and changed only the spelling: Indonesien in German and the Scandinavian languages, Indonésie in French and Czech, Indonezja in Polish. Greek writes Ινδονησία, which shows the nēsos root openly. A few languages go their own way: Vietnamese has Nam Dương beside the phonetic In-đô-nê-xi-a, and Scottish Gaelic says an Ind-innse.

How the map of provinces grew

In 2002 ISO deleted Timor Timur (ID-TT), which became the separate state of Timor-Leste, and gave Irian Jaya the code ID-PA under its new name Papua. The same update added Bangka Belitung, Banten, Gorontalo and North Maluku. Riau Islands followed in 2004, West Sulawesi in 2005 and West Papua in 2010.

North Kalimantan, split from East Kalimantan, entered the standard in 2014. Three Papuan provinces were added on 29 November 2022 (Central Papua, Highland Papua and South Papua) and Southwest Papua a year later, which brings the count to 38. The ISO list spells Highland Papua as Papua Pengunungan; the province itself writes Papua Pegunungan.

Two units keep a status of their own. Yogyakarta is a special region (daerah istimewa) and Jakarta a capital district. Law No. 2 of 2024 made Jakarta the Special Region of Jakarta Province (Daerah Khusus Jakarta). The 2022 Law on the State Capital names Nusantara as the future capital, but Jakarta remains the capital until a presidential decree formally transfers it.

Province names put the compass word after the island or region: Jawa Barat is West Java, Sulawesi Tenggara is Southeast Sulawesi, Papua Barat Daya Southwest Papua.

Flag of Indonesia

The flag, called Sang Saka Merah-Putih or simply Merah-Putih, the red and white, is two horizontal bands with red above white in the proportion 2:3. It was first raised on 17 August 1945 and became the official flag on 17 August 1950. The flag of Monaco has the same two colours in the same order but in a different proportion and a slightly different red; the Polish flag reverses them.