INTRODUCTION
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contexts, such as discussion of politics and technology. As the modern world continues to intrude into even the remotest villages, through television and education, knowledge of Indonesian grows. Larger regional languages are surviving the increasing spread of Indonesian into aspects of everyday life, but for many minor languages there is increasing threat to survival as speakers turn to Indonesian in more and more areas of their daily lives. For most of the 20th century, the greatest challenge to Indonesian was to quickly become the language of unity and a fully developed national language able to cope with all the demands of modern life. During the century, the language underwent enormous changes, including significant syntactic elaboration and a much enlarged lexicon, thus acquiring greatly enhanced powers of expression. During the Suharto era (1966–98), the government viewed standardisation and modernisation of the language as essential to its program of economic development. As a consequence, the nature of the language and the language-planning process came in for criticism from some who saw the language as too closely linked to the authoritarian Suharto government. Today, the language faces new challenges. The unity of the Indonesian state is under threat and this presents threats to the continued development, expansion and stability of the language.
A B R I E F H I S TO RY O F T H E L A N G UAG E The Malay-speaking people originated on the coastal plains of east and southeast Sumatra and off-shore islands, later spreading to the Malay Peninsula and to coastal areas of Borneo. They were first-rate seafarers and traders and their position in the Straits of Malacca between Sumatra and the peninsula brought them into contact with merchants and seamen from India and later from China and other countries. Able to control east–west trade, which was required to pass through the Straits of Malacca, Malay kingdoms became prosperous and powerful. From its early history, the Malay language was used in the region by traders and travellers from many lands as their means of communication with each other. When trade routes spread east to the Moluccas (Spice Islands), and even further afield, Malay was taken along, becoming the language of trading ports throughout the archipelago. Simplified forms of Malay, heavily influenced by local languages, formed the basis for later creole varieties, especially in the eastern archipelago, where they sometimes displaced local languages as the first language of the home. Such forms of Malay were well established in the Moluccas when the Portuguese