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The Malay alphabet has a phonemic orthography; words are spelled the way they are pronounced, with a notable defectiveness: /ə/ and /e/ are both written as E/e.The names of the letters, however, differ between Indonesia and rest of the Malay-speaking countries; while Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore follow the letter names of the English alphabet, Indonesia largely follows the letter names of ...
Malaysian English (MyE), formally known as Malaysian Standard English (MySE), is a form of English used and spoken in Malaysia as a second language. Malaysian English should not be confused with Malaysian Colloquial English, which is famously known as Manglish, a portmanteau of the word Malay and English, or Street English.
Malay is the lingua franca of Malaysia, a federation of former British colonies and similar dependencies. English is a foreign language with no official status, but it is commonly learnt as a second or third language. The Malaysian accent appears to be a melding of British, Chinese, Tamil, and Malay influences.
The first English trader to visit the Malay Peninsula was Ralph Fitch who arrived in the 16th century. [3] However, the British only became formally involved in Malay politics in 1771, when Great Britain tried to set up trading posts in Penang, formerly a part of Kedah. The British established a trading post in Singapore in 1819 and gained ...
The first major orthographic reform of Malay Rumi Script was initiated by a British scholar administrator, Richard James Wilkinson in 1904, from which the Wilkinson spelling or 'Romanised Malay Spelling' was introduced, and became the official system widely used in all British colonies and protectorates in Malaya, Singapore and Borneo. [8]
Nevertheless, acoustic measurements suggest that Malay has more syllable-based rhythm than British English, [24] even though doubts remain about whether the syllable is the appropriate unit for the study of Malay prosody. [21]
The Malay language has many loanwords from Sanskrit, Persian, Tamil, Greek, Latin, Portuguese, Dutch, Siam (Old Thailand), Korean, Deutsch and Chinese languages such as Hokkien, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka. More recently, loans have come from Arabic, English and Malay's sister languages, Javanese and Sundanese.
English as spoken in Malaysia is based on British English and called Malaysian English. British spelling is generally followed. Since 1968, Malay has been the country's sole official language. While English is widely used, many Malay words have become part of common usage in informal English or Manglish.