It is not sufficient for BIPA learners to understand basic linguistic elements such as grammatical structures, vocabulary, and pronunciation to achieve optimum communicative competence in the Indonesian language. Optimum communicative competence must also cover understanding of intralinguistic and extralinguistic contexts embedded in a language entity. For this purpose, it is urgent to describe two types of contexts which must be understood by BIPA learners. This research aims to describe the intralinguistic and extralinguistic contexts necessary to consider and understand the speaker's meaning, especially for foreign speakers learning the Indonesian language. Data are gathered from various sources and experts of authority. Since the researcher is the native Indonesian speaker, the data are also drawn from his linguistic intuition. The data gathering methods are the observation and conversation methods, each employing the basic and advanced techniques. The collected data are then classified and typified to obtain types of data to be subjects of proper analysis method and technique. The analysis method in this research is content analysis. The research results show that there are several intralinguistic contexts in the Indonesian language that must be considered by BIPA learners to achieve optimum communicative competence.