Traditionally, Malayic lects in southern Sumatra are divided based on river shed and microethnic boundaries, regardless of actual similarities and differences between them.

Linguists originally used the term Middle Malay (a calque of Dutch Midden-Maleisch) when referring to the closely related lects in the Pasemah-Serawai cultural region.

[3] McDowell & Anderbeck (2020) classified South Barisan lects into 2 major dialect clusters, namely 1) Oganic and 2) Highland.

[5] All ISO 639-3 language codes for South Barisan Malay varieties were merged into [pse] in 2007 by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, with the exceptions of [vkk] for Kaur and [pel] for Pekal.

[4] The old codes ([bke], [eni], [lnt], [ogn], [sdd], [srj]) are no longer in active use, but still have the meaning assigned to them when they were established in the Standard.