Riau

Riau is a province of Indonesia, located in the center of Sumatra island along the Strait of Malacca. The provincial capital and largest city is Pekanbaru. Other major cities includes Dumai, Bagansiapiapi, Bengkalis, Bangkinang, Rengat and Siak Sri Indrapura.

Indonesian was based on the Riau version of Malay language.

Riau is one of the richest provinces in Indonesia. This province is rich with natural resources, particularly petroleum and natural gas, rubber, and palm oil.

The province was once heavily forested lowlands, but with palm oil plantations and logging being major industries it is losing around 2,000 square km of forest per year. In 2005 the forest cover was down to 33% (or 27.000 square km) from 78% (or 64.000 square km) in 1982.^[2] Being a province with a predominantly low relief, the coastal regions are rapidly losing land to the ocean.

The Riau Islands were part of Riau until 2004, when they were made into a separate province.

Capital	Pekanbaru
Governor	Rusli Zainal
Area	82,232 km2 (31,750 sq mi)
Population	4,948,000 (2000)
Density	60.2 /km2 (156 /sq mi)
Ethnic groups	Malay (38%), Javanese (25%), Minangkabau (11%), Batak (7%), Banjarese (4%), Chinese (4%), Buginese (2%) [1]
Religion	Muslim (88%), Protestant (1%), Catholic (5%), Buddhist (6%), Hindu (0.2%)
Languages	Malay, Indonesian, Minangkabau
Time zone	WIB (UTC+7)
Web site	www.riau.go.id Economy The economy of Riau expanded faster (8.66% in 2006) than Indonesian average (6.04% in 2006). Thanks to mainly resource based economy, be it crude oil (600,000 bpd), palm oil and other forest products. Local government income benefit from greater share of revenue of tax (mainly crude oil) due to decentralization law in 2004. Riau Indonesian The dialect of Indonesian spoken in this region is considered by linguists as having one of the least complex grammars among the languages of the world (apart from creoles), possessing neither noun declensions, nor temporal distinctions, nor subject/object distinctions, nor singular/plural distinction. For example, the phrase Ayam makan (lit. 'chicken eat') can mean, in context, anything from 'the chicken is eating', to 'I ate some chicken', 'the chicken that is eating' and 'when we were eating chicken'.[4] A possible reason for this is that Riau Indonesian has been used as a lingua franca for communication between different people in this area during its history, and extensive foreign-language use of this kind tends to simplify the grammar of a language used.[5] Riau Indonesian served as a basis for the modern national language of Indonesia, Bahasa Indonesia, which however has extensive additional influence from Chinese, Arabic, Dutch and English, among others.