Malaylanguage

Malay language, or Bahasa Melayu, is an Austronesian language spoken across Maritime Southeast Asia. It is the official language of Malaysia and Brunei and one of the official languages of Singapore; it also functions as a regional lingua franca in parts of Indonesia and among Malay-speaking communities throughout the region. The language forms the basis of Indonesian, the national language of Indonesia, though Indonesian and Malay have diverged in vocabulary, pronunciation, and usage.

Linguistic classification places Malay in the Malayic subgroup of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. Standard varieties include Bahasa Malaysia (Malaysia) and Bahasa Brunei (Brunei). In Singapore, Malay is one of the official languages with its own standardized form. Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) is a closely related standard based on Malay, but it has developed its own norms. Local dialects and registers across Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and southern Thailand show substantial variation, yet there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between standard Malay and Indonesian.

Scripts and orthography have historically included Jawi, an Arabic-based script, alongside the Latin-based Rumi script. Today, Rumi is the dominant script for everyday use, education, and official communications, while Jawi persists in religious, cultural, and some traditional contexts.

Grammar and vocabulary are characteristic of analytic Austronesian languages. Malay relies on affixation (prefixes, suffixes, and infixes), reduplication, and word order to express grammatical relations. It has a rich supply of loanwords from Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Tamil, Dutch, and English, reflecting centuries of cultural and commercial contact.

Malay is widely used in education, media, government, and literature across several countries, and it exhibits regional dialects and variations that reflect local identities while maintaining broad mutual intelligibility.