Demographic distribution of Javanese speakers

Javanese is spoken throughout Indonesia, neighboring Southeast Asian countries, the Netherlands, Suriname, New Caledonia and other countries. However, the greatest concentration of speakers is found in the six provinces of Java itself, and in the neighboring Sumatran province of Lampung.
Below, a table with the number of native speakers in 1980 is provided.

	Indonesian province	% of the pop.	Javanese speakers (1980)
1.	Aceh province	6.7%	175,000
2.	North Sumatra	21.0%	1,757,000
3.	West Sumatra	1.0%	56,000
4.	Jambi	17.0%	245,000
5.	South Sumatra	12.4%	573,000
6.	Bengkulu	15.4%	118,000
7.	Lampung	62.4%	2,886,000
8.	Riau	8.5%	184,000
9.	Jakarta	3.6%	236,000
10.	West Java	13.3%	3,652,000
11.	Central Java	96.9%	24,579,000
12.	Yogyakarta	97.6%	2,683,000
13.	East Java	74.5%	21,720,000
14.	Bali	1.1%	28,000
15.	West Kalimantan	1.7%	41,000
16.	Central Kalimantan	4.0%	38,000
17.	South Kalimantan	4.7%	97,000
18.	East Kalimantan	10.1%	123,000
19.	North Sulawesi	1.0%	20,000
20.	Central Sulawesi	2.9%	37,000
21.	Southeast Sulawesi	3.6%	34,000
22.	Maluku	1.1%	16,000

Based on the 1980 census, persons in approximately 43% of Indonesia's households spoke Javanese at home on a daily basis. By this reckoning there were well over 60 million Javanese speakers. In 1980, the total number of the Indonesian population was 147,490,298.
Above only 22 provinces of the then 27 provinces of Indonesia are taken. In each of these provinces, more than 1% of the population are Javanese speakers.
The distribution of persons living in Javanese-speaking households in East Java and Lampung requires clarification. For East Java, daily-language percentages are as follows: 74.5 Javanese; 23.0 Madurese; and 2.2 Indonesian. For Lampung, the official percentages are 62.4 Javanese; 16.4 Lampungese and other languages; 10.5 Sundanese and 9.4 Indonesian.
These figures are somewhat outdated for some regions, especially Jakarta while they remain more or less stable for the rest of Java. In Jakarta the number of Javanese has increased tenfold in the last 25 years. On the other hand, because of the conflict the number of Javanese in Aceh might have decreased. Furthermore it has to be noted that Banten has separated from West Java province in 2000.
In Banten, Western Java, the descendants of the Central Javanese conquerors who founded the Islamic Sultanate there in the 16th century still speak an archaic form of Javanese. The rest of the population mainly speaks Sundanese and Indonesian as this province borders directly on Jakarta. Many commuters live in the Jakartan suburbs in Banten, among them also Javanese speakers. Their exact number is however unknown.
At least one third of the population of Jakarta is of Javanese descent and as such speak Javanese or have knowledge of it. In the province of West Java, many people speak Javanese, especially those living in the areas bordering Central Java, the cultural homeland of the Javanese.

Madurese in Javanese script

The province of East Java is also home of the Madurese people, who number almost a quarter of the population (mostly on the Isle of Madura), but many Madurese actually have some knowledge of colloquial Javanese. Since the 19th century, Madurese was also written in the Javanese script. Unfortunately, the aspirated phonemes of Madurese are not reproduced in writing. The 19th century scribes apparently overlooked, or were ignorant of, the fact that Javanese script does possess these characters.
In Lampung the original inhabitants, the Lampungese, only make up some 15% of the population. The rest are the so-called "transmigrants", settlers from other parts of Indonesia, many as a result of past government transmigration programs. Most of these transmigrants are Javanese who have settled there since the 19th century.
In the former Dutch colony of Suriname (formerly called Dutch Guiana), in South America, approximately 15% of the population of some 500,000 are of Javanese descent, thus accounting for 75,000 speakers of Javanese. A local variant evolved, the "Tyoro Jowo-Suriname" or "Suriname Javanese".