About Malay
by Pisith PhlongNumber of speakers
Malay is an official language of Malaysia. It is also the official language of Brunei Darussalam,Indonesia (called Bahasa Indonesia) and one of the official languages of Singapore. (Frawly,Vol. 2, p. 540) An estimated 20 to 30 million people speaks Malay.
Language group
Malay, also known as Bahasa Melayu or Bahasa Malaysia, is one of the Malayic languages. It belongs to the Western Malayo Polynesian group of the Austronesian language family. (Strazny,Vol. 2, p. 644)
History of written language and script
The history of the Malay and Indonesian languages are quite closely related to each other, for both of them shared the same root and background of language development in the past. TheMalay language has long been spoken in the Malay Archipelago area with successive influencesfrom other languages such as Sanskrit from India at about the 4th century, Arabic around the14th century and English, Dutch, Portuguese beginning about the 17th century. It was in 1928that the Malay language separated into Malay language for Malaysia, and the Indonesianlanguage (Bahasa Indonesia) for Indonesia following the declaration of the All Indonesian YouthCongress in Jakarta. (Llamzon, p. 282-283). The two languages are slightly different in their language form as Malay has had more influence from English, while Indonesia received moreinfluence from Dutch and the Javanese language. (Frawly, Vol. 2, p. 541)
Language
The Malay language has a long history based in the Malay Archipelago going back about 2000years ago. Through the Indian sea trade, the Indian cultures started to take root inside the Malayculture and brought rise to many Malay kingdoms on the Sumatra and Java islands from aboutthe 7th century onward. Some examples of these are the Buddhist temple of Borobudur, theHindu Prambanan, the Sri Vijaya kingdom, the glorious culture of Majapahit in east Java, andthe important cultural center of Bali. (Herbert, p. 123) The Malay language origins can be dated back to about the 7th century in south-central Sumatra, the area called Jambi and Palembang,associated with the Sri Vijaya kingdom, where the earliest written records on inscriptions werefound with scripts deriving from the Pallava script of India.The Malay language might have come from the Borneo, where the earliest inscription of Kutai inSanskrit language, dated 400 AD was found. These earlier inscriptions used the Sanskritlanguage and it is commonly considered to be the
Old Malay
language. Old Malay spread intoJava and The Philippines, but it didn’t exist there for long. In Sumatra, the Old Malay continueddeveloping and served as a major literary language among the indigenous people of manysuccessive kingdoms. By the 14th century, Islam spread into North Sumatra and Java and it became a dominant religion in North Java by the 15th century. With Islam, the Arabic languagegained status and influence over the Old Malay. Many forms of writing such as legends,chronicles, religious treatises, legal documents and letters used standardized Malay, called the
Classical Malay
which evolved from the Old Malay through time and space. In the early 16thcentury, the Portuguese arrived in the Malay Archipelago for the spice trade in the Moluccaswhile the Dutch came in later and colonized Indonesia from 1749 to 1942 (Herbert, p. 123-124)In the mean time, the British Administration started to establish centers in Southeast Asia. TheBritish created the center in Penang in 1786, in Singapore in 1819, and in Malacca in 1824. In
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