Former British colonies speak English, former Spanish colonies speak Spanish, and former Portuguese colonies speak Portuguese. Why do former Dutch colonies like Indonesia not speak Dutch?

by zudnic
RecursiveParadox

Actually most of the former colonies do in fact speak a local dialect of Dutch and have it as one of (or the) official language including the ABC islands and Suriname. Afrikaans is derived from Dutch (and largely mutually intelligible). Likewise, Papiamentu in Curacao is a partially Dutch-based creole.

Also, Bahasa Indonesia contains many loan words and some syntactically analogous structures (forgive me I don't know the proper linguistics term here) derived from Dutch, although how Indonesia came to form a nation-wide language is a story in itself.

wolverine237

The Netherlands also does not have anything resembling a large Indonesian diaspora on the scale of, say South Asians in the UK and North Africans in France.

Jan_Hus

I can't answer the question, but I'd like to say that there are former British, Portuguese and Spanish colonies where most of the population does not speak the respective empire's language. Examples would be the Philippines, a former Spanish colony; or the previously British Nigeria. In Mozambique, only about half of the Population speak Portuguese; and most of them as a second language.