There are more than 300 different ethnic groups or tribes in Indonesia.
The Javanese are the largest ethnic group in Indonesia with 41% of the total population. The Javanese mostly gathered in Java, but millions of people have transmigrated and dispersed to various islands in the archipelago even migrate to foreign countries like Malaysia and Suriname. Sundanese, ethnic Malays, and Madurese are the largest tribe in the country next. Many remote tribes, especially in Kalimantan and Papua, have had only a small population of hundreds of people. Most of the local languages in the Austronesian language family group, though a large number of tribes in Papua belonging to the Papuan or Melanesian language family. Based on data from Census 2000, the ethnic Chinese Indonesia amounted to approximately 1% of the total population. Indonesia's ethnic Chinese residents speak various dialects of Chinese, mostly Hokkien and Hakka.
The division of ethnic groups in Indonesia was not absolute and it is not clear due to migration, the mixing of cultures, and mutual influence, as an example of some people argue Banten and Cirebon is a separate tribe with a particular dialect as well, while the side while others argue that they are simply sub-Javanese ethnic tribe as a whole. Similarly Bedouin tribe that while the parties consider them as part of a whole tribe Sunda. Another example is the mixing of ethnic Betawi tribe which is the mixing of different ethnic tribes result of both immigrants and the archipelago the Chinese and Arabs who came to live in Batavia in the colonial era.
