And Tamil and Chinese traders also shaped Bazaar Malay or Baba Malay, a pidgin language that later evolved into modern-day Indonesian.īut wait, why do we keep talking about Indonesian? Indonesian vs Malay: What’s the Difference? It’s heavily influenced by Sanskrit and Arabic, while early modern colonialism introduced English and Dutch loanwords. Much like how millions of non-native speakers use English to communicate, people on the Malay peninsula use Malay to communicate with people from other communities and ethnic groups – even when it’s not the first language of anyone in the room. And if you then remove Indonesian from the category, and look at just native speakers of bahasa Melayu, you’re left with just 19 million speakers spread across Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. Yet if you disregard all the people who speak Malay as a second language, this number drops to just 77 million. And that figure has likely increased over the past 11 years, due to growing population sizes. There were around 200–250 million speakers of Malay in 2009, according to the linguist James T.

But whether you’re speaking bahasa Melayu or bahasa Indonesia, you’ll find that it unlocks smiles and lets you hold conversations with complete strangers through to friends’ families.īefore you start creating word lists and searching for tutors, let’s take a look at the Malay apps, courses, and textbooks you might like to use, as well as what sets the Malay language apart and how to create your study plan.

Malay is just two (yes, two!) of these languages. Welcome to the Malay archipelago: a region of jam-packed cities and mega-diverse jungles, fast-growing economies and shopkeepers who you’ll call “auntie,” historic temples, soaring skyscrapers, powerful artwork, arcades you could get lost in, restaurants you would happily get lost in, and hundreds of languages and cultures living side-by-side – sometimes with friction, but mostly happily.

Plr bahasa melayu percuma