Origin of the Bahasa Malayu language
Many hypotheses are there as where the Malay language originated. One of the reason is that it came from Sumatra Island. The oldest written documents in Malayu, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, which were found on Bangka Islan, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra ‘Malayu’ was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese scripting as ‘Mo-lo-yo’ and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the ‘tributary states’ of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
History of bahasa languages
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, language of Hinduism and Buddhism. The fastest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pal lava variant of Grantha script and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription. This was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batten burg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatung, a tributary of the River Musi It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
Classification with related languages
Bahasa language is classified with Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from South East Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a language spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family. Malayo-Polynesian language is one of the members of this family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian language. Malay’s closest language scripting influences include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and and Palauan.
History of writing Malayu language
In 1959, Indonesia and Malaysia signed an agreement contract to standardize the Malay spelling system of both countries This was necessary on behalf of Indonesia's Romanized writing because of the influences by the Dutch whereas Malaysia, remain as the British system. They named this new unified system ‘Melindo’, an acronym for Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia.
