Malay is an Austronesian language spoken by over 200 million people in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. It is the official language of Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and Singapore. It is also spoken in parts of Thailand, the Philippines, and East Timor.
Malay is a member of the Malayo-Polynesian family of languages and is related to other languages in the region, such as Indonesian, Javanese, and Sundanese. It is written using the Latin alphabet, with some additional characters.
Malay has a long history, with references to the language dating back to the 7th century. In the 15th century, it began to be widely used in literature, and in the 17th century it was adopted as the official language of the Sultanate of Johor.
The Malay language has two main dialects: Standard Malay and Colloquial Malay. Standard Malay is used for formal settings, such as in government and education, while Colloquial Malay is the more commonly spoken form of the language.
Malay is an agglutinative language, meaning that it uses affixes to modify words. It also has a number of loanwords from other languages, including Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese, and Portuguese.
We have native Malaysian speaking lawyer-linguists/legal translators to assist with your Malaysian language needs.