Malaysia has around 18.5 million native Malay speakers out of the population of 32 million people. Malaysia is an ethnically and linguistically diverse country where there are people speaking in Chinese and Indian languages as well as numerous indigenous and minority languages. Everyone in Malaysia learns Malay at school but some speakers of other languages either are not fluent in Malay or they choose not to speak it very much after they graduate from school.
In
Singapore, Malay is an ethnic minority. Malay language is spoken by
700,000 native speakers about 13 percent of the population. Malay
language is also spoken by 266,000 people as a native language in Brunei
or about 64 percent of her population. Thailand has about 1 million
Malay native speakers adjacent to Peninsular Malaysia and it is spoken
by about 11.23 million people in Indonesia. But that is only part of the
story. Indonesia also has 43 million natives speakers of bahasa
Indonesia and 155 million speakers speaking it as a second language.
Standard Malay v. Malay Dialects
When speaking about Malay language, we need to distinguish between Malay dialects which vary from place to place and the standardized form of the language.
The first standardized form of the language is bahasa Melayu which is spoken in Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore and functions as an umbrella language for all of the Malay dialects there. The second standardized form of the language is bahasa Indonesia. It is used in Indonesia and functions as a lingua franca between speakers of different languages because there are hundreds of languages in Indonesia. However, the focus of this topic is solely on bahasa Melayu which is a standard language of Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore.
In Malaysia, the official name of bahasa Melayu is bahasa Malaysia. The reason for this is to show that the language is a language of all Malaysian citizens and not confined only to ethnic Malays. However, some people want to change the name back to bahasa Melayu.
