Javanese

Javanese is an Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian language spoken in central and eastern Java. Old Javanese or Kawi appears in the Sukabumi inscription of 804, in letters derived from India's Pallava script. From the 700s to the 1400s Kawi was the literary language of Java's Hindu-Buddhist courts.

Majapahit's founding in 1292 opened the final Kawi phase, which produced the Nagarakretagama of 1365, a eulogy of King Hayam Wuruk preserved on palm leaves in Bali and Lombok after Kawi ceased to be written in Java in the early 1500s. Modern Javanese emerged later that century as Islam took hold on the north coast, and the Arabic-based Pegon script was adopted.

The Mataram Sultanate moved the literary center to the Surakarta and Yogyakarta courts in the 1600s, fixing the written standard and ngoko and krama speech levels. Books were printed from the 1830s, at first in carakan.