Features of the Malay Language

A. Structure of Sentences

Like most of Austronesian languages, Malay is not a tonal language. It has simple phonology and each written letters only represents one sound in most cases.

It has simple subject, verb and object (SVO) sentence structure. Simple example can be seen as below

• Saya makan jagung I eat corn

Sentence with negation is like this

• Saya tidak makan sayur I do not eat vegetables

If we add modal verb to the above sentence:

• Saya tidak mahu makan sayur I do not want to eat vegetables

If we add another noun, we would use conjunction just like below

• Saya tidak mahu makan sayur atau minum teh I do not want to eat vegetables or drink tea

B. Grammar

Malay grammar is simple. First of all, there is no grammatical gender, no noun cases, no plural form and if we want to make a plural explicit, we reduplicate the word or repeat the word. For example, orang means person. If we are to make it plural, we would say orang-orang and it means people.

If we want to modify a noun, we add a modifying word after noun for example orang utan which means forest people to mean orangutan. If we add demonstrative pronoun it would look like this buku itu which means that book. Add a pronoun after the noun to function as possessive pronoun, buku saya, my book. For plural form of the previous sentence, buku-buku saya or my books. We can also add an adjective to a noun, buku mahal or an expensive book.

In Malay, there is no copula verb (to be) at least in regular speech. There is no definite or indefinite article, so buku mahal could also mean the book is expensive. But to be clear, we might say, buku itu mahal.

Prepositions in Malay are very straight forward and intuitive. Examples such as below

• Saya berasal dari Kanada I come from Canada
• Saya nak pergi ke pasar malam I want to go to the night market
• Ada diskaun untuk pelajar There is a discount for students

One of the things that makes learning Malay fun is that there are no verb conjugations. The form of the verbs stays exactly the same regardless of whether it is in present tense, past tense or future tense. So, we have the verb meaning to eat. In present tense, makan. Past tense, makan and future tense is also makan. The tense is determined by specifying a time period like:

• Dia makan nanti He will eat later; or using an adverb before the verb
• Dia akan makan He will eat
  
• Dia sudah makan He already ate

But of course, it is not quite that simple because we have the verb makan or to eat but we also have the verb dimakan to be eaten and termakan to be eaten accidentally. We also have the verb memakan which means to consume. The challenge here lies in building words from roots and affixes. Besides creating some new verbs, we can also create other types of words for example:

• Makanan food
• Pemakan someone who eats
• Pemakan sayur vegetarian

Malay makes extensive use of this kind of affixation. Let's look at one more example using the root verb 'ajar' which means to teach. With affixation, we have:

• Ajaran teachings
• Belajar to learn
• Mengajar to teach
• Diajar to be taught (intr.)
• Diajarkan to be taught (trns.)
• Mempelajari to study
• Dipelajari to be studied
• Pelajar student
• Pengajar teacher
• Pembelajaran learning
• Berpelajaran to be educated

All of these affixes might seem overwhelming at first but they are fairly systematic. Once we get used to all of the function of different affixes, it would help us to understand words that we have never heard before. This helps us to guess words that we do not know yet.