Page:Baba Malay. An Introduction to the Language of the Straits-born Chinese.pdf/2

50 BABA MALAY. of all the islands of Malaysia, which contains probably more than three-fourths of the entire population of the Archipelago. The immense numerical preponderance of the Javanese and Sundanese has resulted in the admixture of a very large proportion of the words of those two languages in the “Low Malay” of Jaya, so that the Malays of the Straits of Malacca have difficulty in under- standing it. On the island of Jaya there are very few people of the Malay race properly so called, and the “Low Malay” of Java is not the spoken language of the Malays at all, but merely a jargon concocted by the mixed multitude of various tongues who live together in that island, and must necessarily haye a common lan- guage as a means of communication. Having been made the official language of the Dutch government, Low Malay is fostered by the strong arm of the law, newspapers are published in this bastard dialect, and it promises to be the permanent colloquial language of the southern part of the Archipelago. q

Tn the British possessions on the Malay Peninsula the linguis- tic conditions are entirely different. Here the strongest native race numerically is the Malay, and there is absolutely no other native language to compete with the Malay language for the ascendancy. There are, however, two very distinct dialects of the Malay language spoken on the Malay Peninsula, namely, (1) The pure Malay as it is spoken by the Malays among them- selves, with its peculiarly terse idiom, its grammar of prefixes and su, and its immensely rich vocabulary of words of pure Malay origin; and (2) The so-called colloquial Malay of the Settlements, the common means of communication between Europeans, Chinese, Tamils, Malays, and all the other nationalities of these great trading centres, which has comparatively a very small vocabulary, and makes but little use of those grammatical changes in the form of words which make the pure Malay language so expressive.

Of these two dialects we will first deal with

THE SPOKEN LANGUAGE OF THE PURE MALAYS.

As already stated above in our remarks on what the Dutch call “High Malay, *the spoken language of the Peninsula Malays is in fact the language of Malay literature, and has undergone prac- tically no change whatever in the past three centuries. This is due very largely to the fact that the Malays hold themselves almost entirely aloof from the peoples of other races who come here to trade and to develop the natural resources of the country, leaving the heavy manual labour of the mines and plantations, and all the wholesale and retail trade to be done by the Chinese. The only important changes which have taken place in the spoken lan- guage of the Malays in the past 300 years appear to have been through the addition of those Arabic words required to express the religious ideas which have come to them through the teachings of Mohamedanism. Even when the Malays are in the closest pro- Jour. Straits Branch