I am very excited to present my newest regular feature: Friday’s Featured Language! Every Friday I will be featuring an audio clip and text translation from a real native speaker of a language.  This will give speakers an opportunity to share a little bit about their language with us, and will give us an opportunity to hear what the language really sounds like!  Did I mention I’m really excited about this project? (Sorry for the excessive use of exclamation points in this post!)

My very first featured speaker is Thiyani, a native speaker of Indonesian (or bahasa Indonesia).  Thiyani grew up monolingual in Indonesia and now lives in the USA.  She speaks English in her day-to-day life, but in her home she speaks English, Indonesian, and Javanese.  She says what she likes about language in general is “its connection to culture.”

Indonesian is the national language of Indonesia, where…