WI: Malay as one of the world's lingua franca

What are the best conditions for the Malay language to become one of most spoken languages in the world by the year 2000?
 
Last edited:
Well, it's one of the most spoken languages in the world today... accelerating it to 1900 is hard, though - it requires mass education throughout Indonesia.
 
It might be impossible get Malay global lingua franca, but local lingua franca it could be.

Best way is that there is surviving Srivijaya or Mayapahit. Srivijaya and Mayapahit were both markable powers during their zeniths.

Or just avoid colonisation or colonisation happen under one nation so there not be division of Malay and Indonesian languages.
 
It might be impossible get Malay global lingua franca, but local lingua franca it could be.

Best way is that there is surviving Srivijaya or Mayapahit. Srivijaya and Mayapahit were both markable powers during their zeniths.

Or just avoid colonisation or colonisation happen under one nation so there not be division of Malay and Indonesian languages.

Majapahit spoke Javanese, though. Malay was the trade language.

Malay and Indonesian are pretty much as similar as American and British English anyway so they should really be seen as two dialects of the same language (Riau Malay).
 
If it's about 2000, then there's an argument that it could be done with a POD in 1950. You'd want Malaysia and Indonesia to post fast enough growth rates that their present-day GDP per capita is on a par with that of South Korea and Japan. Japan had been the richest country in Asia for centuries, but Korea was poor and still managed to grow fast. In fact, South Korea and Malaysia were equally rich in 1980, and the divergence only happened afterward, as Malaysia's attempt to create a domestic market for state-owned industry flailed while South Korea's export-oriented model succeeded.

Give Indonesia the GDP per capita that Japan and South Korea have today and Malay is comfortably the #3 language in the world in speakers' total income, not far behind Chinese and well ahead of Spanish and Japanese.

If you want to be even more speculative, you can spin a story in which Malay becomes dominant in parts or even all of the Philippines. As a trade language, it extended to what is now the Philippines before the Spanish conquest: in his voyage, Magellan had a Malay slave who used Malay to communicate with the people in the Philippines. This influence didn't penetrate far enough north for the Philippines to use Malay as their national language rather than Tagalog, but it might just be attractive in Mindanao.
 
Top