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Old 15th August 2018, 01:36 PM   #11
Green
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Join Date: Apr 2015
Location: Malaysia
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Malay is essentially a very simple language. Migrant workers from South India or Nepal for example can pick up the language within 3 months without any formal training course and merely by interacting with their fellow malay co workers.

A great majority of malay words are borrowed from other languages. Primarily from sanskrit and later from arabic when the people became muslims and in the modern era a lot of words are taken fro English such as bas (bus) gelas (glass) komputer (computer) etc...It is not inconcievable that warang/warangan has been adopted by the malay keris community since early days but this word is never used in other situations by general population and if you ask any malays who do not delve in keris , it is almost certain that he will not know the word.

Having said that, and as an aside, it is to the great credit of Soekarno the late president of Indonesia who decided to use malay as the basis for 'bahasa Indonesia' and adopt it as the national language of Indonesia and bind the disparate people of Indonesia that speak all sorts of languages.
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