Ogrim wrote:To me a more interesting question would be why there are some languages "nobody" seems to study. I may be wrong, but in all my years at HTLAL and LLorg I cannot remember anyone seriously studying e.g. Armenian, which has some eight million speakers scattered around the world. Or what about Guaraní, an official language of Paraguay and the native language of more than six million people? I guess if I were to give up on Arabic and Russian for five years I'd pick one or both of these.
Javanese is one of those languages that is criminally underrepresented for its population. Caray, it's one of the most spoken languages in the world! To be honest, I think even Indonesian is underrepresented here in Australia. My high school offered it as a subject, but most students chose French or Japanese, even though Indonesia is a lot closer to Australia than France or Japan. In the language market, Indonesian could definitely do with selling itself better.