Malay language

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Malay (UK: mə-LAY; endonym: Bahasa Melayu, Jawi script: بهاس ملايو) is an Austronesian pluricentric macrolanguage native to several islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and the Malay Peninsula on mainland Asia. The language is an official language of Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore, where the standardised forms are known as Standard Malay. Within the Malay language family, another standardised form which is known as Indonesian is the official language in Indonesia and also one of the working languages of Timor-Leste. Malay is the ethnic language of Malays in Sumatra, Borneo and surrounding islands in Indonesia, the Malay Peninsula, southeast Philippines, southern Thailand, and the Southern Province of Sri Lanka. Altogether, it is spoken as a first language by about 80 million people and as a first or second language by close to 300 million. The language is pluricentric and a macrolanguage, i.e., a group of mutually intelligible speech varieties, or dialect continuum, that have no traditional...

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