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| VOCABULARY DATABASE > INDONESIAN AND MALAYSIAN > INFORMATION |
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages. It is spoken as a first language by some 33 million people, and in its standard forms Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia, it is the official language for more than 200 million people. Both forms are based on a pidgin called Bazaar Malay that had been in use as a lingua franca for centuries.
The earliest written records in Malay date from the late 7th century. Literature in Malay started with the Islamization of the country in the 15th c., and it had become a literary language in its own right by the 17th c. Under European colonial domination, literature in the language declined, but it was revived during the 20th c. Upon independence from European colonial powers, special commissions engaged in the task of inventing vocabulary in many branches of knowledge.
Malay is an agglutinative language that uses lots of affixes and doubling (e.g. to indicate a plural form). The spelling system of Indonesian Malay was based on Dutch, until in 1972 it was almost completely assimilated to the Malaysian standard. There are some differences in vocabulary between both standards of the language which are comparable to those between British and American English. Malay borrowed words from Arabic, Hokkien (Taiwanese), Sanskrit, Portuguese, Dutch, and English.
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