A Foreign Investment: Indies Malay to 1901

The promotion of Malay by the Netherlands Indies administration during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries to a point where the language became a standardized instrument of quasi-hational identity was a notable divergence from the imperial norm. By contrast, the Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French colonialists elsewhere imposed their own languages, which in many cases have persisted after the formal end of colonialism as virtual national languages, or at least as vehicles for communication with the outside world.