Indonesian Language Dictionary to include 200,000 entries by 2024-end

JAKARTA - The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education's Language Agency affirmed that the latest update to the Great Dictionary of the Indonesian Language (KBBI) will comprise at least 200,000 words by December 2024, reported Antara news agency.

"We are completing 180,000 currently, and we expect the remaining 20,000 will be completed by December 2024," Language Agency Head Imam Budi Utomo stated at a press conference here on Saturday.

The agency head said the dictionary update is conducted "massively and radically" to ensure the 200,000-word target will be achieved since the average addition of new words to KBBI was only 2,500 yearly.

"If we stick to the 2,500 words phase, we need another 30 years to reach the 200,000 target," he stated.

He said the update of the Indonesian dictionary is the follow-up action to the recognition of Indonesian as an official language of the Unesco General Assembly in November 2023.

Meanwhile, Utomo explained that new words included in KBBI, of which the latest version has only 120,600 entries, comprise loanwords from regional languages in Indonesia and foreign languages whose spelling has been adjusted to Indonesian orthographic rules.

The dictionary will also include colloquial and non-standard words commonly used by Indonesians. The addition of a "coll." label on the appropriate words will help readers determine whether the words in the KBBI are part of the formal register or not, he noted.

"We collaborate with Oxford University and lexicographers from the UK to provide us with the entries and data, which numbers reach hundreds of thousands," he added.

The number of entries in the Indonesian dictionary has grown steadily from 62,000 in the first edition of KBBI, launched in 1988, to 120,000 in the latest edition, the sixth, launched in 2023.

The Language Agency also introduced a digital dictionary starting from the fifth edition of the KBBI launched in 2016. - BERNAMA-ANTARA