Language Preference on Social Media - Survey Report

Indonesia may only have the 4th largest population in the world, but that does not stop this archipelagic nation from claiming the title as “social media capital of the world.” In 2012, Semiocast discovered that the most tweets sent out came from Jakarta. Another Indonesian city, Bandung came out 6th after Tokyo, London, Sao Paulo and New York. Facebook, the world’s most dominant social network is also widely used by Indonesians. Path’s largest market is Indonesia. With more people gaining access to the internet, it is expected that Indonesians’ embrace of social media will only increase.

Gaining access to the internet also means that users will get to interact with more people. This includes people – both Indonesians and hinchable non-Indonesians – who speak different languages. These interactions can happen in many spaces, but the most popular medium is social media.

This survey looks at respondents’ language preference on cheap water trampoline social media for making posts. The results reported here come from 513 respondents from all across Indonesia.

As Bahasa Indonesia is the national language, it is no surprise that most respondents use only or mostly Bahasa Indonesia (55.17%). But this is only a little more than half. What is interesting is that about 2 in 5 say that they use Bahasa and one or more languages equally.

In taking a closer look at the results, the percentage of males who tend to post only or mostly in Bahasa Indonesia is greater than females. The percentage of females who prefer to post in different languages solely or in addition to Bahasa is almost the same as those who post only in the official language (49.92% vs. 51.08%).

So the question is – after Bahasa Indonesia, what are people’s language patterns and choices?

Perhaps it is due to the fact that English is a universal and global language that it is people’s preferred language choice for making posts after Bahasa Indonesia. Respondents were asked about languages that they use regularly when communicating on social media, and the results show that people are more inclined to communicate in English over the local language.

When looking at this statistic from a gender breakdown, it is found that females are likelier to use English more whereas males favor the local language. Males use the local language at a rate of 46.10% to 38.96% for females. In terms of English, females regularly use it at 52.38% to 40.43% for males.

As the world gets more interconnected, it means that internet users have greater interactions with diverse groups of people. The medium for interaction tends to occur via social media, and that means that language is important.

Respondents cited the following as reasons for communicating on social media using different languages. With students learning foreign languages, social media becomes the learning and practice space outside of the classroom. No wonder nearly half use a different language on social media in addition to Bahasa. Or, in some cases, it might be easier to capture one’s thought in a different language which is where people may turn to using the local language.

Language for Expressing Different Posts

To expand on this idea of ease of communication, we asked respondents about their language preference for several types of posts. As expected, the default language choice is Bahasa Indonesia. But for different posts, the numbers varied.

The second largest group of respondents tend to post in English, but only in several cases is significant. It seems that there might be an ease in posting in English to express a short status as indicated by 30% of the respondents.

In expressing anger, Two in 5 choose Bahasa Indonesia whereas 1 in 4 choose English and 1 in 5 use the local language. Among all of the different posts, this type of post elicited the most varied response with the numbers not varying as largely as for other posts. Anger taps deep into the core which can trigger usage of the local language, or it seems that English can also be called upon which would indicate a fluency in the language.

Language by Social Media Platform

Finally, we asked respondents about what language they usually make posts in for different social media platforms. Again, the official language comes out on top across the board, but the second choice varies.

For Snapchat and Instagram, English garnered the largest number which means that after Bahasa Indonesia, users post only in English. On the other hand, for Facebook and Twitter, people say that they post in 2 or more languages.

For Path, Twitter and Snapchat, the rate of using Bahasa Indonesia is higher than for Facebook and Instagram ranging from 68.34% for Twitter to 75.74% for Snapchat. Different social media platforms are used for different purposes, and it could be the case that language usage varies based on why they use a certain platform and to express what.

For more detail you can download XLS report at the button below (bahasa). JAKPAT report consists of 3 parts which are 1) Respondent Profile, 2) Crosstabulation for each question and 3) Raw Data. Respondent profile shows you demographic profiles ( gender,age range, location by province, and monthly spending). Cross tabulation enables you to define different demographic segment preference on each answer.