Jakartanese, better known as Betawi, is the Malay-based language of the Betawi people, the long-established population of Jakarta. It grew out of the Malay spoken in the old port city of Batavia and absorbed words from Javanese, Sundanese, Hokkien Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese and Dutch, a record of the city's trading past. Estimates of speaker numbers vary widely, but the language is still heard in Betawi neighbourhoods and cultural life. Its bigger influence today is indirect: colloquial Jakarta Indonesian, the informal speech of the capital, borrows heavily from Betawi and has spread across Indonesia through television and social media. Betawi is written, when written at all, in the Latin alphabet.
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