About Youth Pledge
The spirit of building an ethos of nationalism should be further maintained so that it is not easily distorted by the interests of power, because the pledge has lost its strength, especially among the elites.
J Kristiadi
It consists of a sentence of less than 40 words, but it has an extraordinary power. The pledge was echoed by representatives of the Indonesian youths from all over the archipelago. They gathered on Oct. 28, 1928 and vowed to unite. This monumental event is called Youth Pledge Day. Their determination to unite was successful. This phenomenon was considered miraculous and extraordinary as they agreed to use Malay as the national language although there were not many speakers of the language.
Malay had few speakers and was mostly used by traders and fishermen who generally had high mobility. So, it was expected at that time that the language could spread more quickly in other regions of Indonesia. The youths who represented regions whose languages had a larger number of speakers, for the sake of Indonesian unity, sincerely accepted that their languages were not used as the national language.