Malay

Malay (/məˈleɪ/;^[5] Malay: Bahasa Melayu بهاس ملايو‎) is a major language of the Austronesian family spoken in Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. A language of the Malays, it is spoken by 290 million people across the Strait of Malacca, including the coasts of the Malay Peninsula of Malaysia and the eastern coast of Sumatra in Indonesia, and has been established as a native language of part of western coastal Sarawak and West Kalimantan in Borneo. It is also used as a trading language in the southern Philippines, including the southern parts of the Zamboanga Peninsula, the Sulu Archipelago, and the southern predominantly Muslim-inhabited municipalities of Bataraza and Balabac in Palawan.

Common difficulties

The Foreign Service Institute has estimated that learning Malay to a Professional Working Proficiency in the language (a score of Speaking-3/Reading-3 on the Interagency Language Roundtable scale) will take an average of 36 weeks (900 class hours).