engkau

Engkau is a second-person singular pronoun used in Malay and Indonesian to address someone directly in informal or intimate speech. It roughly corresponds to the English “you,” but carries a closer, more familiar or rustic tone than the formal anda and is often more intimate than kamu or kau in everyday usage. In literature, songs, and religious or ceremonial language, engkau can appear with a poetical or archaic nuance.

Register and regional variation vary. In Malaysia and Brunei, engkau appears widely in casual conversation among friends and family, but it is typically avoided in formal settings, official writing, or customer-facing speech, where anda or the neutral kamu is preferred. In Indonesian, engkau is less common in everyday conversation today and is more likely to be found in poetry, older literature, or religious texts; in some regions or communities, it may still be used for emphasis or stylistic effect in contemporary speech.

Grammatical notes are simple: engkau does not mark gender and is used for a single addressee. It contrasts with plural forms such as kalian or dengan kata ganti orang ramai, and with other second-person pronouns like kau, kamu, and anda, whose use signals different social distance and formality.

Etymology traces engkau to historical Malay and Indonesian pronoun systems within the broader Austronesian family; it remains part of the pronoun inventory primarily in informal, literary, and ceremonial language.

See also kau, kamu, awak, anda.