With close to one-hundred million speakers, Javanese is the largest language of the Austronesian family and one of the main regional languages of Indonesia. Javanese predominates in central and eastern Java as well as in a strip along the north coast of west Java (except around Jakarta. Migrants have carried Javanese to other parts of Indonesia (Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi) and outside the country to Malaysia, New Caledonia and Suriname. Javanese speakers migrated to Malaysia mainly from 1880 to 1930 relocating in the peninsula (parts of Perak, Selangor, and Kedah) though there are also some in the province of Sabah in the northern area of Borneo. Migrant workers arrived to New Caledonia, in the Pacific, between 1900 and 1938. In Suriname, a former Dutch colony in South America, plantation workers were brought from Java between 1890-1939. Javanese is a regional language of Indonesia, but not the official one. It is losing ground to Bahasa Indonesia, a form of Malay, used as a lingua franca and promoted as the national tongue of the country. The original dictionary on which this volume is based was published in 1973 by Yale University. As stated in the introduction which follows, the Indonesian government issued a major orthography update after the Yale edition was published. It is now almost 50 years since the Yale edition was published and to my knowledge nothing has been standardized in the interim. The language has continued to evolve while at the same time being strongly influenced by the national Indonesian language and English. We have incorporated the new orthography changes into this edition and added an all-new English - Javanese index which was missing from the original. We have also added many business, computer, and internet terms which have now become common-place in the language. Many of these are loan-words from English, others are taken from Indonesian. It is our hope that this volume will become the standard for building a comprehensive Javanese -English foundation and since we now have and maintain this volume in digital format, corrections and additions can be made regularly.
