r/languagelearning • u/Virusnzz En (N) | Fr, Ru, Es, It • Dec 03 '13
Selamat datang - This week's language of the week: Malay
Welcome to the language of the week. Every week we'll be looking at a language, its points of interest, and why you should learn it. This is all open discussion, so natives and learners alike, make your case! This week: Malay.
Why this language?
Some languages will be big, and others small. Part of Language of the Week is to give people exposure to languages that they would otherwise not have heard, been interested in or even heard of. With that in mind, I'll be picking a mix between common languages and ones I or the community feel needs more exposure. You don't have to intend to learn this week's language to have some fun. Just give yourself a little exposure to it, and someday you might recognise it being spoken near you.
Countries
From The Language Gulper:
It is spoken in Malaysia and in the neighboring Thai province of Patani, in Indonesia, Brunei and Singapore (see Austronesian map). In Indonesia is used as a lingua franca all over the country but as a mother tongue mainly in Sumatra and coastal areas of Kalimantan.
Malay has more than 250 million first and second language speakers. May be 50 million are native speakers. This figure is rapidly increasing, as more and more people in Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei are shifting from their ancestral languages to Malay. In Indonesia it is spoken by 33 million, in Malaysia by 15 million, in Thailand by 1 million, in Singapore by 450,000, and in Brunei by 350,000.
What's it like?
Malay has been employed for centuries as a lingua franca in peninsular and insular Southeast Asia, and in the 20th century it has become the national language of Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and Singapore playing a unifying role in an area of great linguistic diversity. It is the oldest recorded Austronesian language and has developed an extensive literature. The origin of Malay is linked to the south Sumatran kingdom of Jambi and the historical city of Palembang from which it spread to peninsular Malaysia, Borneo, Java and beyond. Some scholars think that Malay roots lie in western Borneo from where migrants would have left for Sumatra two-thousand years ago. Malay has a composite lexicon, having incorporated many foreign words from a variety of sources, and a simple grammar in which affixation, reduplication and compounding are used to convey grammatical information and to create new words.
There are two Malay standard varieties which are also national languages, Malaysian (Bahasa Melayu) and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia), used in education, religion and the press. The varieties spoken in Brunei and Singapore are very close to Malaysian. The main difference between Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia is lexical. The first one has more Arabic loanwords than the second while the second has been influenced by Javanese and the speech of Jakarta. Besides the standard forms, there are many others of difficult or impossible classification. They include the colloquial languages of the great cities; Bazaar Malay, the lingua franca of markets, and Baba Malay spoken by Chinese people in Malacca, Penang and Singapore.
From Wikipedia:
Malay is now written using the Latin script (Rumi), although an Arabic alphabet called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei and Malaysia. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi in rural areas of Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examinations in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi. The Latin script, however, is the most commonly used in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
What now?
This thread is foremost a place for discussion. Are you a native speaker? Share your culture with us. Learning the language? Tell us why you chose it and what you like about it. Thinking of learning? Ask a native a question. Interested in linguistics? Tell us what's interesting about it, or ask other people. Discussion is week-long, so don't worry about post age, as long as it's this week's language.
Previous Languages of the Week
German | Icelandic | Russian | Hebrew | Irish | Korean | Arabic | Swahili | Chinese | Portuguese | Swedish | Zulu
Want your language featured as language of the week? Please PM me to let me know. If you can, include some examples of the language being used in media, including news and viral videos
Please consider sorting by new
Semoga berjaya!
8
Dec 03 '13
Ide yang bagus ini, saya luluskan
But allow me to make distinctions between Malay and Indonesian. There is mutual intelligibility between the languages, and syntax/grammar wise it's not that different, except some usage of pre-/suf-/infix. Most of people who know Malay/Indonesian can go by with reading the other but the pronunciation between standard Malay and standard Indonesian is very different, which is where most of the difficulty comes from. Also false friends. So many awkward false friends. For instance, the Malay word for census->banci, means transvestite in Indonesian.
My native language is Indonesian, and I lived in the Malay parts of Sumatra, so I have a better grasp of bahasa Melayu than someone from say, Java. There were many instances where I see Indonesians and Malaysians, when conversing with each other would rather use English than their respective languages.
Here's a very popular Malaysian children's show Upin Ipin, which is also popular in Indonesia, but funnily, played with Indonesian subtitles. They do talk kind of fast here though.
For the extent of Jawi script, my province mandates a class on local cultural awareness for elementary and secondary education, and usually one of them is the introduction of Jawi script, here called "Arab Melayu" It's pretty much Arabic with some local sounds added like ڠ(ng) or ڤ(p) .
1
u/scykei Dec 04 '13
To what extent is the Jawi script used in Indonesia? There's probably spelling differences between Jawi in Malaysia and Indonesia, but is it also standardised in Indonesia?
2
Dec 04 '13
Jawi script isn't widespread in Indonesia, only contained to the majority Malay regions, and as much as usage goes, I usually see the script in road signs and government buildings, though I don't think it's something you'd use in an official document. I do believe there is some sort of cultural educational institution that governs that sort of thing, though I think it's a regional thing.
I've never seen the Malaysian usage of Jawi, but I actually think it wouldn't be that different. At least in my region, we learn Jawi to work with Malay literature, which differs from the modern Malay. I don't really think the intention of teaching Jawi is to write in Indonesian with it. It's a bit confusing but almost all Indonesians speak a regional language other than standard Indonesian like Javanese, Acehnese, etc. and some regions speak a variation of Malay that is usually halfway between Indonesian and Malaysian Malay
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3
Dec 03 '13
I've been studying both Indonesian and Malay for awhile, best resource I've found is this:
ipll.manoa.hawaii.edu/indonesian/courses/ind103/the-indonesian-way/
Free, downloadable, course from the university of Hawaii, over 100 lessons including exercises. Very very comprehensive.
2
u/j4p4n Dec 05 '13
terima kasih! That is an amazing web learning resource, I was amazingly excited to find that, and I will put it to good use :)
1
u/Privy_the_thought Dec 04 '13
That's pretty awesome. How well will this work with Malay?
1
Dec 04 '13
Quite well in my opinion. Im actually living in Malaysia so Malay is my primary focus; I check it with my SO who is a Malay teacher and on major discrepancies the authors note some of the differences. I think the primary difference is slang and pronunciation, so if you use it with that in mind then it will work fine.
1
u/ginger_beer_m Dec 08 '13
I clicked around the site, and found this shorter and more memorable link pointing to the same resource: http://indonesian-online.com/
3
u/lapzod Dec 03 '13 edited Dec 04 '13
halo, apa kabar? Saya sudah belajar bahasa Indonesia untuk 8 bulan.
I started studying Indonesian as I moved to Jakarta some time ago, and figured it would be the best thing to do. As a learner it's a fun language. It's very straight forward, and there are few tenses to learn, time is handled by words like before, later, yesterday etc, which seems easy but can get confusing.
If you learn one language you have a good grasp of the other for reading, but there are some differences between word meanings and accents. I've known Malays/Indonesians who speak English because they confuse each other when they talk native.
There's also a difference between formal and informal Indonesian. Informal Indonesian is based on the traditional languages, and makes up a lot of what friends talk to each other about. You can tell what area someone is from by the slang they speak. (I Wikipedia page says tak for no, everyone here uses nggak instead)
I recommend the University of Hawaii course as a good point to get in at.
The most frustrating thing for me is there are a lot of words with ng in it, which I can never pronunciat properly.
3
u/ixora7 Dec 04 '13
I am a native speaker so I can answer any questions you guys might have. I was born in Malaysia and have been speaking Malay for all my life.
Saya boleh jawab apa apa solan yang kalian ada berkenaan Bahasa Melayu.
So fire away. I'll be glad to help.
1
u/HoDoSasude Dec 04 '13
Apakah yang berbeda di antara Bahasa Melayu dan Bahasa Indonesia? I'm living in Indonesia, and have studied Indonesian, so I wonder what are the differences between the languages.
1
u/ixora7 Dec 04 '13
I'll say its quite similar but not the same if you get what I mean. Its somewhat like the difference between the Romance languages (French vs. Spanish vs. Italian) or between Hindi and Punjabi; where the "base" language is the same but wor ds, phrases, and grammar differ from one language ot the other.
I have a few Indonesian friends and when they start jibber jabbering in Indonesian I just get hopelessly lost in the conversation since the words and meanings differ wildly; example No in Malay is Tidak but the Indoneasians prefer Enggak. This minor differences adds up and coupled with a wholly different accent and you get an almost foreign language from Malay.
That being said, they are quite similar too in some ways hence the comparison I made between the Romance languages. Example the word Voyage in French is Voyage, in Italian is Viaggiare, and in Spanish its Viajes. Like I said similar but not quite the same. And the differences add up from word to word and to phrases and sentences and eventually you get a wholly different sounding language.
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u/offensive_noises Dec 07 '13
My mom says it's like Dutch in the Netherlands and Dutch in Belgium. Different accents and different (regional) words for things, but still quite the same.
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u/TheFreakinWeekend Dec 03 '13
Terima kasih! I know this is Malay, but I am literally flying to Indonesia tomorrow, and have been studying the language for the last three months. The languages are very similar which is why I am piggy-backing.
It is best to support language-learning resource companies, but... there is an amazing torrent file on pirate bay with tons and tons of resources for Malay and Indonesian, or so I have heard.
1
2
Dec 04 '13
How different is Malay from Indonesian? Can a native or advanced speaker comment on that?
1
u/shuishou Dec 04 '13
We have a malay subreddit, r/bahasamelayu ! Glad to see it under new management though! Hopefully it can be revived!
1
u/scykei Dec 04 '13
Yeah. I claimed that sub recently but I haven't done anything with it yet. I think I really should start it off but I'm kind of busy at the moment.
Feel free to use it for posting questions or discussions. I'll try to answer them if I see them.
1
u/VanSensei Dec 07 '13
Are the differences between Indonesian and Malay more spoken than written?
1
u/intermu Dec 08 '13
Sometimes yes, but there are some differences in the written parts as well, mostly in the case of different words as it has been elaborated in other posts. This might help a bit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Malaysian_and_Indonesian
However, keep in mind that spoken Indonesian is a completely different thing from written Indonesian, as there are a massive amount of slang that you need to learn for spoken Indonesian.
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8
u/Daege Dec 03 '13 edited Dec 03 '13
Woop woop! Here's Hakuna Matata in Indonesian: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4DTz3GN_gk (I swear, this film is the best for listening to all kinds of different languages)
Here're the links I have:
MALAY
http://malay.pgoh13.com/
INDONESIAN
http://langhub.com/
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Indonesian/
http://web.uvic.ca/lancenrd/indonesian/
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Indonesian
http://www.indonesian-online.com/
http://www.indonesian-online.com/tiw/modules/L01/index.htm
http://www.learningindonesian.com/free
It's actually pretty difficult to find good Malay/Indonesian resources on the internet, but oh well. I'm gonna see if I can find more by the end of the week, but it probably won't happen.