It is one three native Malayic varieties in southern and eastern Borneo along with Banjar and Kutai, of which it forms a dialect continuum.

According to the 2007 edition of Ethnologue there were 11,200 speakers of Berau Malay.

According to James T. Collins in 2006, Berau is characterized by loss of glottal consonants *ʔ and *h, and the sequence *-əC- became into -aCC (also shared by Makassarese).

The latter change has created contrastive gemination in the language, such as tabu "mosque drum" vs. tabbu "sugar cane" (← *təbu) and ini "this" vs. inni "grandparent".

Collins stated that Berau is most closely related to the Kota Bangun dialect of Kutainese.