Claude Guillot Missionaries from the congregation of the Missions-Étrangères de Paris arrived in the Malay world following their expulsion from Siam by the political authorities there in 1783. In 1786, Francis Light invited one of them, Garnault, to settle along with his Christian followers on the Island of Penang. This was the beginning of the Mission in Malaya. Given the heterogeneity of the population, the Mission could not rely on only one language for the purpose of religious propagation, but had to use Siamese, Portugese, Chinese, Latin and other languages. Nevertheless, the missionaries recognised the role that Malay played as a regional lingua franca. In the late 1820s, the missionaries published their first catechisms in Malay, followed later by the translation of other religious works. Active in Penang from 1831 to 1839, the missionary François-Antoine Albrand undertook the elaboration of a Latin- Malay dictionary, which appears to have been finished in 1844. For unclear reasons, this dictionary was never published, but a manuscript version of it may still exist in the archives of this congregation. Some thirty years later, a longtime colleague of Albrand, Pierre Favre, would be the first Frenchman to publish a Malay dictionary.