Malay

The Malay language is one of the leading vernaculars of the world, and has been growing in importance of late years owing to the development of trade and particularly of the rubberplanting industry. It is an easy language to acquire a smattering of, as it involves few difficulties of phonetics, accidence, or syntax in the form of it which is current as a lingua franca. But this jargon bears the same relation to the real Malay language as the Pidgin English of the China ports does to our own English. The real Malay is the speech of the Malays themselves. It is a leading member of a vast family of languages, commonly styled the Austronesian, or Malayo-Polynesian, or Oceanic, family, which is of Asiatic origin, but has an almost entirely insular domain. It includes Madagascar, Indonesia, with a part of Formosa, Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia, as well as the greater part of the Malay Peninsula, a portion of the coast of New Guinea, the Mergui Archipelago off the coast of Tenasserim, and a small tract in Eastern Indo-China, which was probably the original centre of dispersion of the whole family. Its extreme, points in Polynesia are (inclusively) the Sandwich Islands, Easter Island, and New Zealand. With the exception of the languages of Northern Halmahera and a few Papuan ones in or near New Guinea, all the numerous native languages of this extensive area are related together and to Malay

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