User:Captain2123/sandbox

Malaysia national language or Standard Malay is the official language of Malaysia and a standardized register of the Malacca dialect of Malay. It is over 80% cognate with Indonesian and is spoken natively by over 10 million people. As a second language, it is spoken by an estimated 18 million, mostly Malaysians from ethnic minorities.

History
In 1957, Article 152 of the Federation designated Malay as the official language. Between 1986 and 2007, the official term Bahasa Malaysia was replaced by "Bahasa Melayu". Today, in order to recognise that Malaysia is composed of many ethnic groups (and not only the ethnic Malays), the term Bahasa Malaysia has once again become the government's preferred designation for the "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language). The language is sometimes simply referred to as Bahasa or BM.

Writing system
The Malaysian language is normally written using a Latin alphabet called Rumi, though an Arabic alphabet called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official while efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use in Malaysia. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.

Extent of use
The Malaysian language became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities.

Borrowed words
The Malaysian language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Hindi, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms). Modern Malaysian malay also heavily influenced by Indonesian.

Colloquial and contemporary usage
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, such as awek (girl), balak (guy) or cun (pretty). New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang (person), such as kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami) or diorang (dia + orang, "they"). Code-switching between English and Malaysian and the use of novel loanwords is widespread, forming Bahasa Rojak. Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.