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List of loanwords in Malay language

Overview of Malay loanword origin from other languages From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Modern form of Malay language in general has many loanwords from Sanskrit, Persian, Tamil, Greek, Latin, Portuguese, Dutch, Siam (Old Thailand) and Deutsch (Germany). More recently, loans have come from Arabic, English, Japanese and Malay's distant cousin such as Javanese and Buginese. English and other romance/germanic loans are mostly related to trade, science and technology while Arabic loans are mostly religious as Arabic is the liturgical language of Islam, the religion of the majority of Malay speakers. Some were also used in science, makmal for example mean laboratorium. Other austronesian elements are also incorporated from the variant of Malay used in Indonesia due to the exchange of influence on the Indonesian media in Malay pop culture and vice-versa.

Dutch influence over Indonesian vocabulary is highly significant, as Malay was adopted due to usefulness as a trading language during the Dutch East India Company's rule over the archipelago. This has led to approximately 10,000 Dutch words being borrowed into Indonesian. Malay as spoken in Malaysia (Bahasa Melayu) and Singapore, meanwhile, have more borrowings from English.[1]

There are some words in Malay which are spelled exactly the same as the loan language, e.g. in English – museum (Indonesian), hospital (Malaysian), format, forum, hotel, transit etc. By contrast, some Malay words have been loaned into other languages, e.g. in English – rice paddy ("padi"), orangutan, rattan, babirusa,[2] cockatoo,[3] compound,[4] gong, tuak, sago,[5][6] cootie,[7] amok, durian, agar, rambutan, keris, Pantoum/pantun,[8] angrecum (anggrek/ anggrik), cassowary,[9] gingham, caddie, camphor (kapur), Gutta-percha (getah perca), launch, parang, sarong, dammar, and gambir.

Malay has also heavily influenced the forms of colloquial English spoken in Malaysia, also known as Manglish.

Some examples are as follows:

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.
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