Before the onset of European colonisation, the Malay Peninsula was known natively as "''Tanah Melayu''" ("Malay Land"). Under a racial classification created by a German scholar Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the natives of maritime Southeast Asia were grouped into a single category, the Malay race. Following the expedition of French navigator Jules Dumont d'Urville to Oceania in 1826, he later proposed the terms of "Malaysia", "Micronesia" and "Melanesia" to the ''Société de Géographie'' in 1831, distinguishing these Pacific cultures and island groups from the existing term "Polynesia". Dumont d'Urville described Malaysia as "an area commonly known as the East Indies". In 1850, the English ethnologist George Samuel Windsor Earl, writing in the ''Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia'', proposed naming the islands of Southeast Asia as "Melayunesia" or "Indunesia", favouring the former. The name Malaysia gained some use to label what is now the Malay Archipelago. In modern terminology, "Malay" remains the name of an ethnoreligious group of Austronesian people predominantly inhabiting the Malay Peninsula and portions of the adjacent islands of Southeast Asia, including the east coast of Sumatra, the coast of Borneo, and smaller islands that lie between these areas.