Its ancestor, Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, a descendant of the Proto-Austronesian language, began to break up by at least 2000 BCE, possibly as a result of the southward expansion of Austronesian peoples into Maritime Southeast Asia from the island of Taiwan.

The earliest known stone inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, Indonesia, written in the Pallava variety of the Grantha alphabet[19] and is dated 1 May 683.

[21] This 14th-century pre-Islamic legal text was produced in the Adityawarman era (1345–1377) of Dharmasraya, a Hindu-Buddhist kingdom that arose after the end of Srivijayan rule in Sumatra.

The inscription, dated possibly to 702 AH (corresponds to 1303 CE), constituted the earliest evidence of Jawi writing in the Malay world of Southeast Asia, and was one of the oldest testimonies to the advent of Islam as a state religion in the region.

It contains the proclamation issued by a ruler of Terengganu known as Seri Paduka Tuan, urging his subjects to extend and uphold Islam and providing 10 basic Sharia laws for their guidance.

The classical Malay language came into widespread use as the lingua franca of the region during the Malacca Sultanate era (1402–1511).

The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Sanskrit, and Tamil vocabularies, called Classical Malay.

Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognisable to speakers of modern Malay.

[22] The fall of Malacca created dispersal of centres of Malay literature as many literati and scholars took refuge in various other places that were not yet in the sphere of influence of colonial powers, hence literary works were now also being created in Aceh, Java, Macassar, the Moluccas, Champa and elsewhere.

The text is addressed to the king of Portugal, following contact with Portuguese explorer Francisco Serrão.

[24] The 19th century was the period of strong Western political and commercial domination in the Malay archipelago.

The colonial demarcation brought by the 1824 Anglo-Dutch Treaty led to Dutch East India Company effectively colonising the East Indies in the south while the British Empire held several colonies and protectorates in the Malay peninsula and Borneo in the north.

Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this language family.

There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals.

Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script.

[26] Malay is spoken in Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, East Timor, Singapore and southern Thailand.

Functional phrases are taught to members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines as well as local students.

Non-native consonants that only occur in borrowed words, principally from Arabic, Dutch and English, are shown in brackets.

[33][34] However, [ai] and [au] can only occur in open syllables, such as cukai ("excise") and pulau ("island").

An alternative analysis therefore treats the phonetic diphthongs [ai], [au] and [oi] as a sequence of a monophthong plus an approximant: /aj/, /aw/ and /oj/ respectively.

Nouns and verbs may be basic roots, but frequently they are derived from other words by means of prefixes, suffixes and circumfixes.

On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and to denote voice or intentional and accidental moods.

[citation needed] The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (in particular religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, certain Sinitic languages, Persian (due to historical status of Malay Archipelago as a trading hub), and more recently, Portuguese, Dutch and English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).

They are: Minangkabau, Central Malay (Bengkulu), Pekal, Talang Mamak, Musi (Palembang), Negeri Sembilan (Malaysia), and Duano’.

The extent to which Malay and related Malayan languages are used in the countries where it is spoken varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances.

By contrast, Indonesian has successfully become the lingua franca for its disparate islands and ethnic groups, in part because the colonial language, Dutch, is no longer commonly spoken.

(In East Timor, which was governed as a province of Indonesia from 1976 to 1999, Indonesian is widely spoken and recognized under its Constitution as a 'working language'.)

Manado uses the verb pe and Ambon pu (from Malay punya 'to have') to mark possession.

For example, in some parts of Malaysia and in Singapore, kita (inclusive 'we, us, our') is pronounced as /kitə/, in Kelantan and Southern Thailand as /kitɔ/, in Riau as /kita/, in Palembang as /kito/, in Betawi and Perak as /kitɛ/ and in Kedah and Perlis as /kitɑ/.