Indonesian
When Indonesia got independant from Dutch after WWII, they adopted Indonesian, a variation of Malay, as the official language of their newfounded state.
In 1945, when Indonesia declared its independence, Indonesian was formally declared the national language, despite being the native language of only about 5% of the population. (...) With thousands of islands and hundreds of different languages, the newly independent country of Indonesia had to find a national language that could realistically be spoken by the majority of the population and that would not divide the nation by favouring one ethnic group, namely the Javanese, over the others.
This choice met several purposes, already expressed in the Youth Pledge three decades before:
- Unifying the country with a common language.
- Promoting equality of citizens, by adopting a language without class distinctions, hence not Javanese, the most widly spoken language in Indonesia at that time.
Indeed, the pledge defines Indonesian as bahasa persatuan, the language of unity.
Nowadays, more than 200 millions Indonesians speak Indonesian, even if
Most Indonesians, aside from speaking the national language, are fluent in at least one of the more than 700 indigenous local languages.