Malay language

Malay (UK: mə-LAY; endonym: Bahasa Melayu, Jawi script: بهاس ملايو) is an Austronesian pluricentric macrolanguage native to several islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and the Malay Peninsula on mainland Asia. The language is an official language of Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore, where the standardised forms are known as Standard Malay. Within the Malay language family, another standardised form which is known as Indonesian is the official language in Indonesia and also one of the working languages of Timor-Leste. Malay is the ethnic language of Malays in Sumatra, Borneo and surrounding islands in Indonesia, the Malay Peninsula, southeast Philippines, southern Thailand, and the Southern Province of Sri Lanka. Altogether, it is spoken as a first language by about 80 million people and as a first or second language by close to 300 million. The language 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 standardised as the national language (bahasa kebangsaan or bahasa nasional) of several nation states with various official names: in Malaysia, it is designated as either Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language") or in some instances, Bahasa Malaysia ("Malaysian language"); in Singapore and Brunei, it is called Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language") where it in the latter country refers to a formal standard variety set apart from its own vernacular dialect; in Indonesia, an autonomous normative variety called bahasa Indonesia ("Indonesian language") is designated the bahasa persatuan/pemersatu ("unifying language" or lingua franca) whereas the term "Malay" (bahasa Melayu) refers to vernacular varieties of Malay indigenous to areas of Central to Southern Sumatra and West Kalimantan as the ethnic languages of Malay in Indonesia. Classical Malay, also called Court Malay, was the literary standard of the pre-colonial Malacca and Johor Sultanates and so the language is sometimes called Malacca, Johor or Riau Malay (or various combinations of those names) to distinguish it from the various other Malayic languages. According to Ethnologue 16, several of the Malayic varieties they currently list as separate languages, including the Orang Asli varieties of the Malay Peninsula, are so closely related to standard Malay that they may prove to be dialects. There are also several Malay trade and creole languages (e.g. Ambonese Malay) based on a lingua franca derived from Classical Malay as well as Makassar Malay, which appears to be a mixed language.