Malay · Bahasa Melayu

About Malay

Language family

Austronesian, Malayic branch

Where it's spoken

Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore

Speakers

roughly 80 million native speakers and 200+ million including Indonesian varieties

Malay and Indonesian are, at their core, the same language standardized separately by two different nations — mutual intelligibility between educated speakers is generally high despite different loanword layers and some vocabulary drift. Malay served for centuries as the trade and diplomatic lingua franca of maritime Southeast Asia, which is part of why it was chosen as the basis for Indonesia's national language after independence. It belongs to the vast Austronesian family that also includes Tagalog, Javanese, and the Polynesian languages.