Malay is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.

It serves as a bridge connecting millions of people across Southeast Asia.

Learning Malay offers a fascinating window into the history and culture of the region.

Here are seven interesting facts about the Malay language that’ll give you a better understanding of how it works.

Malay has no grammatical gender or verb conjugations

Many popular languages force you to memorize complicated verb tables and noun genders.

Malay completely ignores these rules.

Verbs don’t change based on the subject or the tense of the sentence.

You use the exact same verb form for past, present, and future actions.

Time is simply indicated by adding time marker words like sudah (already) or akan (will) before the verb.

Nouns also have no masculine or feminine genders to worry about.

This makes the initial learning curve for Malay incredibly smooth for beginners.

Plurals are formed by repeating the word

Making a word plural in English usually involves adding an “s” to the end.

Malay takes a much more literal approach to pluralization.

You simply repeat the noun twice to show that there’s more than one of something.

This grammatical feature is known as reduplication.

For example, the word for person is orang.

If you want to say “people”, you simply say orang-orang.

Here are a few more examples of Malay plurals:

It belongs to the Austronesian language family

Malay is part of a massive language family called Austronesian.

This family stretches all the way from Madagascar in Africa to Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean.

Because of this shared root, Malay shares surprisingly similar vocabulary with languages like Tagalog, Hawaiian, and Maori.

For instance, the word for “eye” in Malay is mata.

In Tagalog and Hawaiian, the word for “eye” is also mata.

The number “five” is lima in Malay, Tagalog, and Hawaiian as well.

Malay originally used an Arabic script called Jawi

Today, Malay is written using the standard Latin alphabet, which is locally called Rumi.

This makes reading and writing very easy for English speakers to pick up.

However, this wasn’t always the case.

Before European colonization, Malay was primarily written in Jawi.

Jawi is an adapted version of the Arabic alphabet with a few extra letters created specifically for Malay sounds.

You can still see Jawi used today on street signs, religious texts, and traditional documents in Malaysia and Brunei.

Indonesian and Malay are essentially the same language

Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) and Malay (Bahasa Melayu) are two standardized varieties of the exact same language.

They’re mutually intelligible, meaning a speaker of one can easily understand a speaker of the other.

The differences are mostly found in pronunciation, slang, and borrowed vocabulary.

Malay borrowed heavily from English due to British colonization.

Indonesian borrowed heavily from Dutch due to Dutch colonization in the region.

If you learn one of these languages, you can effectively communicate with speakers of the other.

The language is full of borrowed words

The Malay Archipelago has been a major hub for international trade for centuries.

Traders from India, the Middle East, China, and Europe all left their mark on the Malay language.

You’ll find thousands of loanwords from Sanskrit, Arabic, Portuguese, Dutch, and English.

These borrowed words make building a vocabulary base much easier for foreign language learners.

It is a major lingua franca of Southeast Asia

Malay isn’t just spoken within the borders of Malaysia.

It’s the official language of Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and Singapore.

It serves as a unifying lingua franca for over 300 million people across these diverse nations.

Historically, it was the primary language of trade throughout the Malacca Strait.

This rich history of commerce and travel is exactly why the language spread so far and wide.

Today, it firmly remains one of the top ten most spoken languages globally.