b) Malay

Malay is a big language — really a group of closely related dialects spread over a wide geographical area with lots of loanwords mixed in, somewhat akin to modern English. It has something like 300 million speakers, although most of these grow up bilingual with something else (Javanese, maybe, or Ternate, or Minangkabau); either way it’s one of the biggest languages on Earth by number of speakers. One of its dialects, Indonesian (bahasa Indonesia), is the national language of Indonesia; another, Malaysian (bahasa Malaysia), is the national language of Malaysia. It likely served as a lingua franca throughout the archipelago from quite an early point, and there are other (generally less prestigious dialects) scattered among the islands from Terengganu Malay to Kupang Malay to Ternate Malay to Betawi, the modern dialect of the city of Jakarta.

Malay was also the first language indigenous to the archipelago to have been written down, beginning in 683 CE with the Kedukan Bukit inscription. The inscription is one of several from the kingdom of Śrīvijaya in southern Sumatra, whose capital appears to have been at Palembang (now the second-largest city on the island). Śrīvijaya became wealthy and powerful by monopolizing trade in the Strait of Malacca; it was this trading advantage that probably gave Malay a significant boost in the direction of becoming the archipelago’s lingua franca. The stage of the language represented by the inscriptions from Śrīvijaya is known as Old Malay, characterized by a lack of distinction between the voiced labial consonants /b/ and /w/ and by a large proportion of Sanskrit loans. Inscriptions in Old Malay can be found in Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula, Bangka (off the east coast of Sumatra by Palembang), and even Java.

There is no point at which the Old Malay phase can be definitively considered to have ended because few texts from this period have survived. Insects, heat, humidity, and the fragility of the materials used all meant that early (pre-paper) manuscripts had a limited shelf-life. Periodisation is thus tricky. Only one manuscript in Malay has survived from before the sixteenth century, and it’s a legal text known as the Nītisārasamuccaya, written in late-fourteenth century Dharmasraya, Sumatra, on bark paper (daluang). Commonly known as the Tanjung Tanah manuscript (TK 214), it was preserved in an attic in Kerinci, Sumatra, where the smoke from the hearth kept insects and damp away. Uli Kozok is the chief (but not sole) investigator of the text at the moment, and you can find his website here.

After that, though, Malay entered a stage now called ‘Classical Malay’. Nearly all of the texts in Classical Malay are written in Jawi script, a writing system derived from Perso-Arabic script. As you might expect, Classical Malay is therefore also associated with the rise and spread of Islam in Indo-Malaysia. The oldest extant example of Jawi is the Terengganu Inscription Stone, dated to 1302 CE and found in the state of Terengganu on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula. The oldest Malay historical text, Hikayat Raja Pasai, is dated to later in the fourteenth century on internal references, but most Classical Malay texts are later even than that. Most of the manuscripts themselves are considerably more recent; the oldest MS of Hikayat Raja Pasai was penned in 1797 (and can be found here, completely digitized by the British Library).

What Classical Malay looks like in the Jawi script. BL MS Or. 14350, f.3v

Malay is fairly easy to learn. Since the 1950s it has been written primarily in the Roman script. It has very little if any inflectional morphology, its derivational morphology is a bit trickier but no harder than that of any European language, and the phonology is simple and easy to pronounce for speakers of, well, most languages. Tense marking is not obligatory and is performed by independent morphemes (e.g. sudah ‘already’ = past tense, placed before the verb). The sole difficulty is that there are lots of dialects; I know Standard Indonesian and can understand everything they say on the news, and I can get by reading Classical Malay, but the other dialects take me a bit of time. Nevertheless, if you have the opportunity to take a class in Malay/Indonesian, you will be amply rewarded. It’s a great language to know.