Malay language

• 1. Introduction

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  Malay is spoken as a first language by about 80 million people, and as a first or second language by close to 300 million. It carries an endonym, Bahasa Melayu, and a Jawi-script name, بهاس ملايو. It is an Austronesian language native to the islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and to the Malay Peninsula on mainland Asia. Four countries claim it as an official language. They are Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, where the standardised variety is called Indonesian. Indonesian also serves as one of the working languages of Timor-Leste. Yet calling Malay a single language is more complicated than it sounds. It is pluricentric, a macrolanguage, a group of mutually intelligible speech varieties with no traditional name in common. Some of its speakers consider these varieties distinct languages of their own. How did a language without one shared name spread across Sumatra, Borneo, southern Thailand, the southeast Philippines, and even the Southern Province of Sri Lanka? Why does the same tongue answer to Bahasa Melayu in one country and Bahasa Indonesia in another? And what does it mean that a 14th-century law code and a granite stone can both be read as chapters in its story?

• 2. Homeland And Ancestry

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  Malay historical linguists agree that the Malayic homeland most likely lay in western Borneo. A form known as Proto-Malayic was spoken in Borneo at least by 1000 BCE. It has been argued to be the ancestral language of all subsequent Malayic languages. Proto-Malayic itself had an ancestor, Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, which was a descendant of the Proto-Austronesian language. That deeper ancestor began to break up by at least 2000 BCE. One proposed cause was the southward expansion of Austronesian peoples into Maritime Southeast Asia from the island of Taiwan. The wider family carries traces of this shared descent. Within Austronesian, many conservative languages like Malay preserve roots that changed relatively little from the common ancestor. Cognates appear in words for kinship, health, body parts, and common animals, and the numbers show especially striking similarities. The family even reaches an outlier far to the west, Malagasy, spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. From this Bornean root, Malay traders from Sumatra carried the Malayic cluster across Malaya and the Indonesian archipelago.

• 3. Stones And Inscriptions

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  The Kedukan Bukit inscription is the earliest known stone inscription in the Old Malay language, dated the 1st of May 683. It was found on the island of Sumatra, written in the Pallava variety of the Grantha alphabet. The Dutchman C. J. Batenburg discovered it on the 29th of November 1920, on the banks of the Tatang River, a tributary of the Musi River, near Palembang, in what is now South Sumatra, Indonesia. Old Malay carried the marks of distant trade. It was influenced by Sanskrit, the ancient Indo-Aryan language of India, and Sanskrit loan words sit in its vocabulary. The maritime empire of Srivijaya, based on Sumatra from the 7th to the 11th centuries, spread Old Malay through its expansion and economic power. The language served as the lingua franca of traders, used in ports and marketplaces across the region. The Tanjung Tanah Law was a 14th-century pre-Islamic legal text, produced during the reign of Adityawarman, who ruled from 1345 to 1377 over the Melayu Kingdom. This Hindu-Buddhist kingdom arose after the end of Srivijayan rule in Sumatra. Its laws were written for the Minangkabau people, who still live in the highlands of Sumatra today. A different stone records a different turning point. The Terengganu Inscription Stone, a granite stele bearing Jawi script, was discovered in Terengganu on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula. Dated approximately to 702 AH, or 1303 CE, it is the oldest known evidence of Jawi writing in the Malay world. Its proclamation came from a ruler called Seri Paduka Tuan, urging his subjects to uphold and propagate Islam, and outlining 10 basic Sharia laws as guidance.

• 4. The Classical Standard

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  The Malacca Sultanate, which lasted from 1402 to 1511, turned Malay into the lingua franca of the region. This maritime kingdom sat along the Strait of Malacca and became a hub of international trade and Islamic learning. Under the influence of Islamic literature, the language took in a massive infusion of Arabic vocabulary, alongside continued influence from Sanskrit and Tamil. This enriched form became known as Classical Malay, also called Court Malay, and it evolved into a form recognisable to speakers of modern Malay. The Portuguese captured Malacca in 1511, ending the sultanate. The royal court re-established itself as the Johor Sultanate and kept using Classical Malay as its literary and administrative language. Over time this tradition became tied to the present-day Malaysian state of Johor and the Indonesian province of Riau Islands. Many assumed the spoken Malay of Johor and Riau was closely related to Classical Malay, though the local spoken dialects in fact differ from the literary one. The fall of Malacca scattered the language outward. Literati and scholars sought refuge beyond the reach of European colonial powers, and new Malay literary works emerged from Aceh, Java, Makassar, the Moluccas, Champa, and other regions. Some of the oldest surviving letters written in Malay come from this dispersal. They are the letters of Sultan Abu Hayat of Ternate, in the Maluku Islands, dated around 1521 to 1522. The text was addressed to the king of Portugal, after contact with the Portuguese explorer Francisco Serrão. Tellingly, the Ternateans used the unrelated Ternate language, a West Papuan language, as their first language. Malay served them only as a lingua franca for inter-ethnic communication.

• 5. Colonial Borders, Two Standards

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  The 1824 Anglo-Dutch Treaty drew a colonial line across the Malay world. To the south, the Dutch East India Company effectively colonised the East Indies, while to the north the British Empire held colonies and protectorates in the Malay peninsula and Borneo. Both colonial powers used Malay as a tool of centralisation and modernisation, and they drew on each other's scholarly publications to build standardised versions of the language. This split still shapes how new words are made. Indonesian leans toward Sanskrit when forming new words, owing to its large Javanese and Balinese speaking communities. Malaysian and Bruneian Malay prefer Arabic as a source for neologism, reflecting acceptance of Islamic Arabic practices. Terminology for administration, business, and law came from each colonial master, Dutch for Indonesian and English for Malaysian and Bruneian Malay. The divergence between Indonesian and Standard Malay is systemic. It contributes, to a certain extent, to the way the two sets of speakers understand and react to the world, with a discernible cognitive gap more far reaching than the difference between dialects. Even single words mark the divide. The words for article, pasal and perkara, and for declaration, pernyataan and perisytiharan, are specific to the Indonesian and Malaysian standards respectively.

• 6. Scripts Across Centuries

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  Before Arabic script reached the Malay region, Malay was written in the Pallava, Kawi, and Rencong scripts. Old Malay used Pallava and Kawi, as several inscription stones attest. Similar scripts survive elsewhere, such as the Cham alphabet used by the Chams of Vietnam and Cambodia. Jawi, the Arabic-derived script, gradually took over. Starting from the era of the kingdom of Pasai and through the golden age of the Malacca Sultanate, Jawi replaced the older scripts as the most commonly used in the Malay region. Then a new shift began. From the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, the Rumi or Latin script gradually replaced Jawi. Today Malay is mainly written in the Latin script, known as Rumi in Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore, or Latin in Indonesia, and it uses Hindu-Arabic numerals. Jawi has not vanished. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei and Malaysia, where names of institutions must use both scripts in Brunei and some parts of Malaysia. Jawi is used fully in the religious school, the sekolah agama, compulsory in the afternoon for Muslim students aged from around 6 to 7 up to 12 to 14. Efforts are underway to preserve Jawi in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examinations there may answer questions in Jawi.

• 7. How The Language Works

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  Malay is an agglutinative language, building new words by attaching affixes to a root, forming compounds, or repeating words or portions of words. Nouns and verbs may be basic roots, but often they are derived from other words through prefixes, suffixes, and circumfixes. Grammatical gender is absent from Malay, and only a few words carry natural gender. The same word, dia, serves for both he and she, and dia punya for both his and her. There is no grammatical plural either, so orang can mean person or people. Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they carry no tense. Time is instead marked by adverbs such as yesterday, or by indicators like sudah for already and belum for not yet. A complex system of verb affixes adds nuance, marking voice or intentional and accidental moods. The arrangement of words follows its own logic. Malay has no grammatical subject in the way English does. In intransitive clauses the noun comes before the verb. When both an agent and an object appear, the verb separates them, in OVA or AVO order, with the difference encoded in the verb's voice. The basic and most common word order is OVA, often called passive, though the source notes that label is inaccurate.

• 8. Many Tongues, One Family

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  Brunei Malay is not readily intelligible with the standard language, a reminder of how far the Malayic varieties spread apart. Kedah Malay on the Malay Peninsula poses the same difficulty, though both Brunei and Kedah remain quite close to the standard. There is genuine disagreement over which varieties popularly called Malay count as dialects and which count as distinct languages. The varieties have traditionally been grouped as Malay, Para-Malay, and Aboriginal Malay, though this reflects geography and ethnicity rather than a proper linguistic classification. Para-Malay includes the Malayic languages of Sumatra, among them Minangkabau, Central Malay, Pekal, Talang Mamak, Musi, Negeri Sembilan, and Duano'. Aboriginal Malay covers the languages of the Orang Asli in Malaya, including Jakun, Orang Kanaq, Orang Seletar, and Temuan. Eastern varieties reveal how far meaning can drift. The word kita means we or us in western dialects, but means I or me in Manado. Manado expresses we as torang and Ambon as katong, the latter originally abbreviated from the Malay phrase kita orang, meaning we people. Eastern dialects also lack possessive pronouns and suffixes, so Manado uses the verb pe and Ambon pu, both from the Malay punya, to have, to mark possession. The reach of Malay extends past the archipelago entirely. Through the early Cape Malay community in Cape Town, now known as Coloureds, numerous Classical Malay words were brought into Afrikaans.