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Malay ( , ; , Jawi alphabet: بهاس ملايو) is an Austronesian language spoken primarily by Malays in several islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and the Malay Peninsula on mainland Asia. The language is an official language of Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore. Indonesian, a standardized variety of Malay, is the official language of Indonesia and one of the working languages of Timor-Leste. Malay is also spoken as a regional language of ethnic Malays in Indonesia and the Thai Malays of Thailand. Altogether, it is spoken by 60 million people across Maritime Southeast Asia.10 million in Malaysia as either "Malay" or "Malaysian", 5 million in Indonesia as "Malay" plus 260 million as "Indonesian", etc.
The language is pluricentric and a macrolanguage, i.e., a group of mutually intelligible speech varieties, or dialect continuum, that have no traditional name in common, and which may be considered distinct languages by their speakers. Several varieties of it are standardized as the national language (bahasa kebangsaan or bahasa nasional) of several nation states with various official names: in Malaysia, it is designated as either Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language") or in some instances, Bahasa Malaysia ("Malaysian language"); in Singapore and Brunei, it is called Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language") where it in the latter country refers to a formal standard variety set apart from its own Brunei Malay;See:
in Indonesia, an autonomous normative variety called Bahasa Indonesia ("Indonesian language") is designated the bahasa persatuan/pemersatu ("unifying language" or lingua franca) whereas the term "Malay" (bahasa Melayu) refers to vernacular varieties of Malay indigenous to areas of Central to Southern Sumatra and West Kalimantan as the ethnic languages of Malay in Indonesia.
Classical Malay, also called Court Malay, was the literary standard of the pre-colonial Malacca and Johor Sultanate Sultanates and so the language is sometimes called Malacca, Johor or Riau Malay (or various combinations of those names) to distinguish it from the various other Malayic languages. According to Ethnologue 16, several of the Malayic varieties they currently list as separate languages, including the Orang Asli varieties of the Malay Peninsula, are so closely related to standard Malay that they may prove to be dialects. There are also several Malay trade and creole languages (e.g. Ambonese Malay) based on a lingua franca derived from Classical Malay as well as Makassar Malay, which appears to be a mixed language.
Old Malay was influenced by Sanskrit, the ancient Indo-Aryan language of India. Sanskrit loan words can be found in Old Malay vocabulary. The earliest known stone inscription in the Old Malay language was found on the island of Sumatra. Written in the Pallava alphabet of the Grantha alphabet, it is dated 1 May 683. Known as the Kedukan Bukit inscription, it was discovered by the Dutch people C. J. Batenburg on 29 November 1920 at Kedukan Bukit, on the banks of the Tatang River, a tributary of the Musi River, near Palembang, in what is now South Sumatra, Indonesia. The stone measures approximately . For centuries, Srivijaya, a maritime empire based on the island from the 7th to the 11th centuries, was responsible for the spread of Old Malay throughout the Malay Peninsula and the Malay Archipelago through its expansion and economic power. Old Malay served as the lingua franca of traders and was widely used in various ports and marketplaces across the region. Southeast Asia Digital Library: About Malay
The Tanjung Tanah Law was a 14th-century pre-Islamic legal text that was produced during the reign of Adityawarman (1345–1377) of the Melayu Kingdom (also known as Malayu or Dharmasraya Kingdom), a Hindu-Buddhist kingdom that arose after the end of rule in Sumatra. The laws were for the Minangkabau people, who today still live in the highlands of Sumatra, Indonesia.
The Terengganu Inscription Stone (Malay: Batu Bersurat Terengganu; Jawi: باتو برسورت ترڠݢانو) is a granite stele bearing an inscription in Jawi script, discovered in Terengganu, on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula (in what is now Malaysia). It is considered the earliest evidence of Classical Malay. Dated approximately to 702 Anno Hegirae (1303 Common Era), it represents the oldest known evidence of Jawi writing in the Malay world and stands as one of the earliest testimonies to the advent of Islam as a state religion in the region. The inscription contains a proclamation issued by a ruler of Terengganu, referred to as Seri Paduka Tuan, urging his subjects to uphold and propagate Islam, while outlining 10 basic Sharia as guidance.
Classical Malay came into widespread use as the lingua franca of the region during the Malacca Sultanate era (1402–1511), a powerful maritime kingdom strategically located along the Strait of Malacca that became a hub of international trade and Islamic learning in the region. During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature, which brought about significant linguistic changes, including a massive infusion of Arabic vocabulary, as well as continued influence from Sanskrit and Tamil language. This enriched form of the language came to be known as Classical Malay. It was during this time the language evolved into a form recognisable to speakers of modern Malay.
After the Capture of Malacca by the Portuguese in 1511, marking the fall of the Malacca Sultanate, the royal court re-established itself as the Johor Sultanate. The court continued to use Classical Malay as its literary and administrative language. Over time, this literary tradition became strongly associated with the territories under the sultanate, including the present-day Malaysia state of Johor and the Indonesia province of Riau Islands. As a result, many assumed that the spoken Malay of Johor and Riau was closely related to Classical Malay. However, while the literary language used in the region reflects the classical tradition, the local spoken dialects differ. The fall of Malacca led to the dispersal of Malay literary centres, as many literati and scholars sought refuge in areas outside the immediate control of European colonial powers. As a result, new Malay literary works began to emerge from Aceh Sultanate, Java, Makassar, the Maluku Islands, Champa, and other regions.
Among the oldest surviving letters written in Malay are the letters from Sultan Abu Hayat of Ternate, in the Maluku Islands of present-day Indonesia, dated around 1521–1522. The text is addressed to the king of Portugal, following contact with Portuguese explorer Francisco Serrão. The letters show a sign of non-native usage, as the Ternateans used (and still use) the unrelated Ternate language, a West Papuan language, as their first language. Malay was used solely as a lingua franca for inter-ethnic communications.
The 19th century marked a period of strong Western world political and commercial domination in the Malay Peninsula and the Malay Archipelago. The colonial demarcation brought by the 1824 Anglo-Dutch Treaty led to Dutch East India Company effectively colonising the East Indies in the south, while the British Empire held several colonies and protectorates in the British Malaya and British Borneo in the north. Both colonial powers used the Malay language as a tool of centralisation and modernisation. They made use of each other's scholarly publications in developing the standardised versions of the Malay language. The flourishing of pre-modern Malay literature in the 19th century led to the rise of intellectual movements among the locals and the emergence of new communities of Malay Linguistics.
Within Austronesian, Malay is part of a cluster of numerous closely related forms of speech known as the Malayic languages, which were spread across Malaya and the Indonesian archipelago by Malay traders from Sumatra. There is disagreement as to which varieties of speech popularly called "Malay" should be considered dialects of this language, and which should be classified as distinct Malay languages. The vernacular of Brunei—Brunei Malay—for example, is not readily intelligible with the standard language, and the same is true with some lects on the Malay Peninsula such as Kedah Malay. However, both Brunei and Kedah are quite close. Ethnologue 16 classifies them as distinct languages, ISO3 kxd and meo, but states that they "are so closely related that they may one day be included as dialects of Malay".
Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examinations in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi.
The Latin script, however, is the most commonly used in Brunei and Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using the Pallava script, Kawi script and Rencong script scripts; these scripts are no longer frequently used, but similar scripts such as the Cham alphabet are used by the Chams of Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Malacca Sultanate, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch language and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Malay alphabet script.
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) exercises in the development of Malay as an international language as well as a language of science. The VOA and BBC use Indonesian as one of their standard language for broadcasting. In Australia, Indonesian is one of three Asian target languages, together with Japanese and Standard Chinese, taught in some schools as part of the Languages Other Than English programme. Indonesian has been taught in Australian schools and universities since the 1950s. Indonesian has been recognised as an official language of the General Conference of UNESCO since 2013.
| +Malay consonant phonemes ! colspan=2 | ! Labial consonant
! Dental consonant/ Alveolar ! Postalv./ Palatal ! Velar consonant ! Glottal |
Orthographic note: The sounds are represented orthographically by their symbols as above, except:
Loans from Arabic:
| +Table of borrowed Arabic consonants | ||
| khabar, kabar "news" | ||
| redha, rela "good will" | ||
| lohor, zuhur "noon (prayer)" | ||
| ghaib, raib "hidden" | ||
| saat, sa'at "second (time)" | ||
| Selasa "Tuesday" | ||
| makam "grave" |
| + Table of vowel phonemes of Standard Malay |
Some analyses regard as diphthongs. However, and can only occur in open syllables, such as cukai ("excise") and pulau ("island"). Words with a phonetic diphthong in a closed syllable, such as baik ("good") and laut ("sea"), are actually two syllables. An alternative analysis therefore treats the phonetic diphthongs , and as a sequence of a monophthong plus an approximant: , and respectively.
There is a rule of vowel harmony: the non-open vowels in bisyllabic words must agree in height, so hidung ("nose") is allowed but * hedung is not.
Study by Uri Tadmor which was published in 2003 shows that mutation of ⟨a⟩ in final open syllable is an areal feature. Specifically, it is an areal feature of Western Austronesia. Uri Tadmor classify those types into four groups as below.
| +Final /a/ mutation in Malay-Indonesian dialects and nearby Austronesian languages !Types !Phonemes !"Malay" homeland !Native languages area | |||
| a (origin) | a | Kedah, Brunei | Arekan (eg. Tengger), Sarawak, Sabah, Kalimantan (except Pontianak), East Indonesia |
| Raised | ə, ɨ | Johor, Pontianak, Tanah Abang (Jakarta) | Bali |
| Rounded | o, ɔ | Pattani province, Palembang | Minangkabau, Mataraman (eg. Yogyakarta) |
| Fronted | ɛ, e | Perak, Jakarta, Sambas Regency |
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for 'he' and 'she' which is dia or for 'his' and 'her' which is dia punya. There is no grammatical plural in Malay either; thus orang may mean either 'person' or 'people'. Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as 'yesterday') or by other tense indicators, such as sudah 'already' and belum 'not yet'. On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and to denote voice or intentional and accidental grammatical mood.
Malay does not have a grammatical subject in the sense that English does. In intransitive clauses, the noun comes before the verb. When there is both an agent and an object, these are separated by the verb (OVA or AVO), with the difference encoded in the voice of the verb. OVA, commonly but inaccurately called "passive", is the basic and most common word order.
Para-Malay includes the Malayic languages of Sumatra. They are: Minangkabau, Central Malay (Bengkulu), Pekal language, Talang Mamak, Musi language (Palembang), Negeri Sembilan (Malaysia), and Duano language. Ethnologue 16 also lists Col, Haji, Kaur, Kerinci, Kubu, Lubu'.
Aboriginal Malay are the Malayic languages spoken by the Orang Asli (Proto-Malay) in Malaya. They are Jakun language, Orang Kanaq, Orang Seletar, and Temuan language.
The other Malayic languages, included in neither of these groups, are associated with the expansion of the Malays across the archipelago. They include Riau-Johor Malay (Malaysian and Indonesian), Kedah Malay, Brunei Malay, Berau Malay, Bangka Malay, Jambi Malay, Kutai Malay, Terengganu Malay, Riau Malay, Loncong, Pattani Malay, Bacan Malay, and Banjar language. Menterap may belong here.
There are also several Malay-based creole languages, such as Betawi language, Cocos Malay, Makassar Malay, Ambonese Malay, Dili Malay, Kupang Malay, Manado Malay, Papuan Malay, Thousand Islands Malay, Larantuka Malay, Alor Malay, Balinese Malay, and Sabah Malay, which may be more or less distinct from standard (Malaccan) Malay.
Due to the early settlement of a Cape Malay community in Cape Town, who are now known as , numerous Classical Malay words were brought into Afrikaans.
In Singapore, Malay was historically the lingua franca among people of different nationalities. Although this has largely given way to English, Malay still retains the status of national language and the national anthem, Majulah Singapura, is entirely in Malay. In addition, parade commands in the military, police and civil defence are given only in Malay.
Most residents of the five southernmost provinces of Thailand—a region that, for the most part, used to be part of an ancient Malay kingdom called Pattani kingdom—speak a dialect of Malay called Yawi language (not to be confused with Jawi), which is similar to Kelantanese Malay, but the language has no official status or recognition.
Owing to earlier contact with the Philippines, Malay words—such as dalam hati (sympathy), luwalhati (glory), tengah hari (midday), sedap (delicious)—have evolved and been integrated into Tagalog language and other Philippine languages.
By contrast, Indonesian has successfully become the lingua franca for its disparate islands and ethnic groups, in part because the colonial language, Dutch, is no longer commonly spoken. (In East Timor, which was governed as a province of Indonesia from 1976 to 1999, Indonesian is widely spoken and recognized under its Constitution as a 'working language'.) Besides Indonesian, which developed from the Riau Malay dialect, there are many Malay varieties spoken in Indonesia; they are divided into western and eastern groups. Western Malay dialects are predominantly spoken in Sumatra and Borneo, which itself is divided into Bornean and Sumatran Malay; some of the most widely spoken Sumatran Malay dialects are Riau, Langkat, Musi language and Jambi Malay. Minangkabau, Kerinci people and Bengkulu are believed to be Sumatran Malay descendants. Meanwhile, the Jakarta dialect (known as Betawi language) also belongs to the western Malay group. The eastern varieties, classified either as dialects or creoles, are spoken in the eastern part of the Malay or Nusantara archipelago and include Makassar Malay, Manado Malay, Ambonese Malay, North Moluccan Malay, Kupang Malay, Dili Malay, and Papuan Malay.
The differences among both groups are quite observable. For example, the word kita means 'we, us' in western, but means 'I, me' in Manado, whereas 'we, us" in Manado is torang and Ambon katong (originally abbreviated from Malay kita orang 'we people'). Another difference is the lack of possessive pronouns (and suffixes) in eastern dialects. Manado uses the verb pe and Ambon pu (from Malay punya 'to have') to mark possession. So 'my name' and 'our house" are translated in western Malay as namaku and rumah kita but kita pe nama and torang pe rumah in Manado and beta pu nama, katong pu rumah in Ambon dialect.
The pronunciation may vary in western dialects, especially the pronunciation of words ending in the vowel 'a'. For example, in some parts of Malaysia and in Singapore, kita (inclusive 'we, us, our') is pronounced as , in Kelantan and Southern Thailand as , in Riau as , in Palembang as , in Betawi and Perak as and in Kedah and Perlis as /kitɑ/.
Batavian and eastern dialects are sometimes regarded as Malay creole, because the speakers are not ethnically Malay.
| + Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ! rowspan="2" | English ! colspan="2" | Malay–Indonesian |
| Perisytiharan Hak Asasi Manusia Sejagat (Universal Declaration of Human Rights) | ||
| Perkara 1 | ||
| All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. | Semua orang dilahirkan merdeka dan mempunyai martabat dan hak-hak yang sama. Mereka dikaruniai akal dan hati nurani dan hendaknya bergaul satu sama lain dalam semangat persaudaraan. | Semua manusia dilahirkan bebas dan sama rata dari segi maruah dan hak-hak. Mereka mempunyai pemikiran dan perasaan hati dan hendaklah bertindak di antara satu sama lain dengan semangat persaudaraan. |
| (All human beings are born free and have the same dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should get along with each other in a spirit of brotherhood.) | (All human beings are born free and are equal in dignity and rights. They have thoughts and feelings and should get along with a spirit of brotherhood.) |
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