Birth of Old Malay – Bahasa Melayu

The 7th century saw the birth of Old Malay in South Sumatra. Old Malay had a lot of loanwords from Sanskrit and was widely used as a trade language. After the 14th century, there were dialects emerging in Malaya, Jakarta and Ambon. During then, the language spoken on the islands of South Pacific was simplified Malay. The Standard Malay spoken in Malaysia is also called Malaysian, which is different from Indonesian in some basic vocabularies, pronunciation, certain tense and sentence structure.