Skip to main content

Search from vocabulary

Content language

Concept information

Preferred term

Malay  

Definition

  • Malay, endonym Bahasa Melayu, is an Austronesian language spoken primarily in several islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and Malay Peninsula on mainland Asia. The language is an official language of Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Malay is pluricentric and a macrolanguage, i.e., a group of mutually intelligible speech varieties, or dialect continuum, that have no traditional name in common, and which may be considered distinct languages by their speakers. Several varieties of it are standardized as the national language (bahasa kebangsaan or bahasa nasional) of several nation states with various official names. Classical Malay, also called Court Malay, was the literary standard of the pre-colonial Malacca and Johor Sultanates. Malay is an Austronesian language that belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch. Austronesian languages often possess phoneme inventories smaller than the world average. Two salient morphological characteristics are a system of affixation and reduplication to form new words.

Identifier

  • MSA

Notation

  • BM
  • may
  • MS
  • ms
  • msa

In other languages

  • малайски

    Bulgarian

  • malajski

    Croatian

  • malajština

    Czech

  • malajisk

    Danish

  • Maleisisch

    Dutch

  • malai keel

    Estonian

  • malaiji

    Finnish

  • malaisien

    French

  • Malaysisch

    German

  • μαλαικά

    Greek

  • maláj

    Hungarian

  • malasíska

    Icelandic

  • Malaeis

    Irish

  • malese

    Italian

  • malajiešu valoda

    Latvian

  • malajų kalba

    Lithuanian

  • малајски

    Macedonian

  • Bahasa Malaysia

    Malay

  • Malażjan

    Maltese

  • malayisk

    Norwegian

  • malajski

    Polish

  • malaio

    Portuguese

  • malaeziană

    Romanian

  • малайский

    Russian

  • малајски

    Serbian

  • malajski

    Serbo-Croatian

  • malajčina

    Slovak

  • malajščina

    Slovenian

  • malayo

    Spanish

  • malajiska

    Swedish

  • malayca

    Turkish

  • малайська мова

    Ukrainian

  • malajzišćina

    Upper Sorbian

URI

http://publications.europa.eu/resource/authority/language/MSA

Download this concept: