Beginning with the establishment of a colony in Penang in 1786, English became firmly established in the "Straits Settlement" in the nineteenth century and thereafter, though after Malaysiaʼs independence in 1957 a national language policy reduced the role of the language in the country. The variety known as Malaysian English owes much to its co-existence with other local languages. Several indigenised sub-varieties of MalE can be identified at the informal level, depending on the L1. These sub-varieties co-exist with a more codified and standardised model variety. In some aspects this tendency is slowly being changed, with some of the informal features also appearing in rhetorical and official discourse and a mesolectal form of Malaysian English being increasingly adopted as a local identity marker.