MALAY LANGUAGE. ,Having been the common me dium of intercourse in the Malay archipelago for more than four centuries past, Malay is for practical purposes the most im portant of the Indonesian languages. But it is not the most typical one, for its morphological system has been much simpli fied, making it serve as an easy lingua franca.
We must distinguish between (I) the Malay of the Malays themselves, including (a) the language of literature, which is fairly uniform everywhere, having undergone but little change since the i6th century, and the more modernized styles of jour nalism and letter writing; (b) the speech of educated Malays, based on the common colloquial of the south of the peninsula, the islands of the Riau-Lingga groups, and part of the east coast of Sumatra; a special variety of it, the court language, only differ ing by adding a few terms exclusively appropriate to princely personages; (c) the local peasant dialects, which in the north of the peninsula differ very much, especially in pronunciation, from (b), and (2) the various versions of Malay, often mere jargons, spoken by all sorts of foreigners. In this last class fall the Malay of the Straits-born Chinese and the Malay current in Java, adopted by the Dutch throughout their eastern possessions.
Scripts.—Since the 14th century Malay has been written in the Arabic alphabet augmented by five letters. Thus written, it is sometimes styled Jawi, an Arabic term derived from "Java the Less," an old name for Sumatra. The oldest surviving Malay manuscripts date from about A.D. 1600. Till the 14th century the language was written in Sumatra in an alphabet of South Indian origin ; but old inscriptions are rare and full of Sanskrit words. in some parts of southern Sumatra Malay is still written in a modernized form of this script. The Arabic character, being deficient in vowel symbols and sparing in their use, is ill adapted to Malay, which has many unrelated words differentiated only by vowels. The Dutch and British have transcribed it into the Roman alphabet, the Dutch with Dutch values, the British on the Hunterian system, with (roughly) Italian values for the vowels and English ones for the consonants.
word after a vowel by k when the Arabic script has kof or kaf, by an apostrophe when it has hamzah. In some parts of the Malay region (e.g. Borneo) final k is still a k. Normally, vowels in closed syllables are short, in open ones short or long (except e, which is always short and often suppressed entirely). Two con sonants cannot begin or end a word.
Words are simple, compound, or derivative. Simple words, which are mostly of two syllables, are the shortest forms oc curring in actual use, compound ones are made by reduplication (complete, partial or with variation of one or more sounds), or by junction, of simple words; derivatives by adding to a simple or compound word one or more syllables, incapable of separate existence, which are prefixed, suffixed, or infixed after the initial consonant. Syllabic stress, which is weak, is normally on the penultimate, unless this contains the neutral vowel followed by one consonant only, in which case the stress is on the final. Morphology.—The infixes, em, er, el, are mere survivals. The prefixes and suffixes are living formative factors. The chief prefixes are : ?nag (with variants meny, men, mem, me, accord ing to the initial of the simple word), prefixed in certain syntactical relations and forming verbs of action, mostly transitive, peng (with similar changes), nouns denoting agent or instrument, ber, verbs middle and reflexive, denoting action of the subject on or for itself (or, with a plural subject, reciprocal), intransitive action, state, and, in particular, use, production, or possession, and adjectives of similar import; ter, the accomp lished event, and, in negative or interrogative phrases, possibility, di, the passive. The suffixes i and kan make transitive, kan also causative, verbs ; an, nouns, both by itself and when accompanied by one of the prefixes peng, per, and ke ; the last combination is also a passive. Number, gender, case, person, tense, mood and degrees of comparison can be indicated by the addition of sepa rate words; but the language is terse and prefers an impersonal form of expression and tolerates indeterminateness. Reduplica tion is often used to express indefinite variety, plurality, degree of quality, frequency and reciprocity.