Welcome to our free course in Bahasa Melayu, known officially as Bahasa Malaysia, or Malay. Bahasa, which includes both Malay and the remarkably similar Indonesian, is surprisingly common language with nearly 300 million speakers. Malay is an official language in Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei, and Bahasa Indonesia is the official language of the many islands of Indonesia, with the majority of Bahasa speakers coming from Indonesia (due simply to the large difference in population). There also exist substantial Malay-speaking communities in nearby countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, and even in South Africa!
Malay is most commonly written in Rumi, the Latin alphabet, but it was also historically written in Jawi, an Arabic script with added letters (seen at the top of this page). This course will teach Malay with written in Rumi, though a Jawi primer is on the way.
Our intention is to create a robust course which can bring learners from the very beginning stages of learning all the way to an intermediate stage. Malay is truly dynamic and it is simply not feasible to become truly proficient without interacting more with native speakers, so please check out our page of language resources to build a deeper understanding of this beautiful language. Also be sure to check out our grammar posts, which will go in-depth on important grammar rules. This will also be linked in relevant lessons.
Most of all, enjoy! 🙂