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Malay refers to a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called ''Local Malay'', part of a larger group called ''Malayan'' within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is one form of it), Malaysia, Singapore, and southern Thailand.

Malay is an official language of Brunei and Malaysia, and one of the official languages in Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as ''Bahasa Indonesia'' which literally translates as ''Indonesian language''. It is also called ''Bahasa Kebangsaan'' (National Language) and ''Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu'' (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian military occupation. In Malaysia, the language is now officially known as ''Bahasa Malaysia'' (''Malaysian language''), though some Malay nationalists still want it to be called Bahasa Melayu. In fact Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as ''Bahasa Melayu'' (''Malay language'').

Origin

There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka island near Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. ''Malayu'' was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as ''Mo-lo-yo'' and mentioned in the ''Nagarakertagama'', an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the ''tributary states'' of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.

The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.

Indonesia pronounced Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it ''Bahasa Indonesia.'' However, the language had already been used as the ''lingua franca'' throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the ''Sumpah Pemuda'' ''Youth Vow.'' Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language.

In Malaysia, the term ''Bahasa Malaysia'', which was introduced by the National Language Act of 1967, was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to 'Bahasa Melayu'','' used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, ''Bahasa Melayu'' is the official language of Malaysia. 'Bahasa Kebangsaan'''' (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. However, at present day, Malaysians prefer to identify their national language as Bahasa Malaysia once again.date=May 2009 Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, ''Bahasa Melayu'' was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.

Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.

Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay.

The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.

History

The history of the Malay language can be divided into four periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, and Late Modern Malay.

Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava script and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November, 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.

The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 – 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly from influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.

Classification and related languages

Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.

Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.

Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.

Writing system

Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in 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 Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and are still in use today by the Champa Malay in 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 Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influences, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script.

Extent of use and dialects

The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Bahasa Melayu is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.

Phonology

Orthographic Note:

There are two vowels represented by the letter ''e'', i.e. /e, ɛ/ and /ə/. Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.

In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter ''a'' tend to be pronounced as /ə/.

Grammar

Word Formation

Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).

Affixes

Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. ''masak'' (to cook) yields ''memasak'' (cooks, is cooking, etc.), ''memasakkan'' (cooks, is cooking for etc.), ''dimasak'' (cooked - passive) as well as ''pemasak'' (cook - person), ''masakan'' (cooking, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. ''sapu'' (sweep) becomes ''penyapu'' (broom); ''panggil'' (to call) becomes ''memanggil'' (calls, is calling, etc.), ''tapis'' (sieve) becomes ''menapis'' (sieves, is sieving, etc.)

Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ''ajar'' (teach):

There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (''awalan''), suffixes (''akhiran''), circumfixes (''apitan'') and infixes (''sisipan''). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.

Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:

(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.

Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:

Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:

In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example ''maha-'', ''pasca-'', ''eka-'', ''bi-'', ''anti-'', ''pro-'' etc.

Compound word

In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.

For example, the word ''kereta'' which means ''car'' and ''api'' which means ''fire'', are compounded to form a new word ''kereta api'' (train). Similarly, ''ambil alih'' (take over) is formed using the root words ''ambil'' (take) and ''alih'' (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. ''pengambilalihan'' (takeover). Certain stable words, such as ''kakitangan'' (personnel), and ''kerjasama'' (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.

Reduplication

There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely

Measure words

Another distinguishing feature of Malay is its use of measure words (''penjodoh bilangan''). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.

Measure words cannot be translated into English. Examples are :

Part of Speech

In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:

Function words

There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.

Negations

There are two negation words in Malay, that is ''bukan'' and ''tidak''. ''Bukan'' is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas ''tidak'' is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.

The negative word ''bukan'' however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.

Grammatical gender

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'' or for ''his'' and ''her''. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, ''adik'' can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: ''adik laki-laki'' corresponds to ''brother'' but really means ''male younger sibling''. There are some words that are gendered, for instance ''puteri'' means ''princess'', and ''putera'' means ''prince''; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).

Pluralization

There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.

Verbs

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''. On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.

Word order

The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.

Borrowed words

The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).

Simple phrases in Malay

In Malaysia, to greet somebody with ''Selamat pagi'' or ''Selamat sejahtera'' would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word ''Hi'' would be more usual among friends; similarly ''Bye-bye'' is often used when taking one's leave.

Colloquial and contemporary usage

Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. ''awek'' (girl); ''balak'' (guy); ''usha'' (survey); ''skodeng'' (peep); ''cun'' (pretty); ''poyo''/''slenge'' (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word ''orang'' (''people''), i.e. ''kitorang'' (''kita'' + ''orang'', the exclusive ''we'', in place of ''kami''); ''korang'' (''kau'' + ''orang'', ''you''); ''diorang'' or ''derang'' (''dia'' + ''orang'', ''they'').

The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are:'' Bestlah tempat ni'' (This place is cool);''kau ni terror lah'' (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.

The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:

Dictionary

There are many different Malay dictionaries. In Malaysia, the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP) dictionary is the chief arbiter for the language, and is considered the authority in defining Malay usage. Some other dictionaries are: