Malay language

Austronesian language with some 33 million first-language speakers in the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Borneo, and other parts of Indonesia and Malaysia.

Because Malay was spoken on both sides of the Strait of Malacca, a crucial trade route between India and China, Malay-speaking groups were drawn into international commerce centuries before European penetration of the region, and Malay became a lingua franca in Indonesian ports, giving rise to a range of pidgins and creoles known as Bazaar Malay (Melayu Pasar). In 20th-century Indonesia, a standardized form of Malay was adopted as the national language, Indonesian; written in Latin letters, it is now spoken or understood by about 70% of the population. Similar standardizations of Malay comprise the national languages of Malaysia and Brunei. The oldest known Malay texts are 7th-century inscriptions from southern Sumatra in an Indic script (see Indic writing system); a continuous Malay literary tradition did not begin until the Islamization of the Malay Peninsula in the 14th century.

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      member of the Western, or Indonesian, branch of the Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) language family, spoken as a native language by more than 33,000,000 persons distributed over the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Borneo, and the numerous smaller islands of the area, and widely used in Malaysia and Indonesia as a second language. Malay shows the closest relationship to most of the other languages of Sumatra (Minangkabau, Kerintji, Rejang) and is clearly, but not so closely, related to the other Austronesian languages of Sumatra, Borneo, Java, and to the Cham languages of Vietnam.

      Of the various dialects of Malay, the most important is that of the southern Malay Peninsula, the basis of standard Malay and of the official language of the Republic of Indonesia, Bahasa Indonesia, or Indonesian. A Malay pidgin called Bazaar Malay (mĕlayu pasar, “market Malay”) was widely used as a lingua franca in the East Indian archipelago and was the basis of the colonial language used in Indonesia by the Dutch. The version of Bazaar Malay used in Chinese merchant communities in Malaysia is called Baba Malay. Languages or dialects closely related to Malay that are spoken on Borneo include Iban (Sea Dayak), Brunei Malay, Sambas Malay, Kutai Malay, and Banjarese.

      Typical of Malay grammar is the use of affixes (particles attached to the beginning or end of a word or inserted within the word) and doubling, to mark changes in meaning or grammatical processes. Affixes are demonstrated in constructions such as di-bĕli “be bought” and mĕm-bĕli “buy” from the root form beli “buy!” and kemauan “desire” from mau “want.” Doubling may be used to mark the plural—for example, rumah “house” and rumah-rumah “houses”—or to form derivative meanings, as in kekuningkuningan “tinted yellow” from kuning “yellow” and bĕrlari-lari “run around, keep running” from bĕrlari “run.”

      Modern Malay is written in two slightly differing forms of the Latin alphabet, one used in Indonesia and one in Malaysia, as well as in a form of the Arabic alphabet called Jawi, which is used in Malaya and in parts of Sumatra. The earliest written records in Malay are Sumatran inscriptions dating from the late 7th century and written in a Pallava (southern Indian) alphabet.

      Malay literature effectively begins with the coming of Islām in the late 15th century; no literary works dating from the Hindu period (4th to late 15th centuries) have survived. Malay literature can be divided into that which was written in classical Malay, the written language of Malay-speaking Muslim communities scattered, from the 15th century, along all the coasts of Southeast Asia but based principally on the straits of Malacca; and modern Malaysian Malay, which, about 1920, began to replace classical Malay in Malaya.

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