The most important trait of a language is that it is a tool for communication. How do we typically start to communicate with others? By introducing ourselves!
In Malay, we typically ask for someone’s nama (name) in a style similar to English, though with a few major caveats. Compare the following sentences:
What is your name?
Simple, right?
Siapa nama anda?
Literally “who name you”
My name is Adam.
Easy peasy.
Nama saya Adam.
“Name My Adam”
Let’s start with some quick vocab so we can break this down a bit:
| Malay | English |
|---|---|
| Siapa | Who/Whose |
| Nama | Name |
| Saya / Aku | I/Me/My |
| -ku | My |
| Anda / Awak / Kamu | You/Your |
| -mu | Your |
| Dia | He/She/Her/Him |
| -nya | His/Her |
So right off the bat we can see a few differences, such as lots of words with the same translation, usage of “who” instead of “what”, different sentence order, and the absence of the all-important word “is”.
The many words with the same translation (saya + aku, anda + awak + kamu) actually have some slight but very important differences between them.
Usage of “who” instead of “what” when asking “what is your name?” is a quirk of Bahasa. Siapa means who or whose, not what. Might as well learn it the right way, yeah? On the bright side, most usages of the “Wh-” words is fairly similar to English.
Different sentence order and the lack of copula (using the verb “to be”, or in this situation, “is”) is a major difference between English and Bahasa. While some patterns hold true, such as Subject-Verb-Object in saying “I eat apples” (Malay: “Saya makan epal”), other times it will be correct to use OVS, VOS, VSO, and so on. Don’t worry is this seems complicated right now, I promise it will be covered.
We also have the suffixes –ku, –mu, and –nya. These are appended to words to indicate possession, such as namaku (my name), keretamu (your car), rumahnya (his/her house). Very simple and time-saving! Note that you’ll hear these less often in formal settings.
Finally, dia. Dia isn’t just a fantastic song by Fauziah Latiff, it’s also a handy word that can mean him or her, but this must be determined via context. It can lead to confusing situations but at least it makes speaking easy!