Malay is derived from Austronesian, which is one of the world’s largest language families, and spoken in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei and Thailand. Standard Malay speakers number about 18 million but there are a further 170 million people who speak Indonesian, which is a form of Malay.
Malay became the official language of Malaysia in 1968. It developed from a dialect which was used in the southern Malay Peninsula. Modern Indonesian, a standardized form of Malay, and Malay Language share about 80% of the same vocabulary. Indonesian and Malaysian speakers can usually communicate quite easily. Malay has been widely influenced and borrowed words from many languages such as Arabic, Sanskrit, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English.
