Malay people: Encyclopedia II - Malay people - Ethnic group vs. cultural sphere

Malay people - Ethnic group vs. cultural sphere

The term Malay can refer to the ethnic group who live in the Malay peninsula (which include the southernmost part of Thailand call Patani and Satun) and east Sumatra as well as the cultural sphere that encompass a large part of the archipelago. The Malay ethnic group is the majority in Malaysia and Brunei and a sizeable minority in Singapore and Indonesia. This people speak various dialects of Malay language. The peninsular dialect is the standard speech among Malays in Malaysia and Singapore. Meanwhile, the Riau dialect of eastern Sumatra is adopted as a national tongue, Bahasa Indonesia, for the whole Indonesian population. The ethnic Malay are virtually Muslim in Brunei, Singapore, southern Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, while those of the Philippines and East Timor are mostly Christian. In Malaysia , the vast majority of the population is made up of Malays and the others compromise of Chinese, Indians and Eurasians.

Malay cultural influences filtered out throughout the archipelago, such as the monarchical state, religion (Hinduism/Buddhism in the first millennium AD, Islam in the second millennium), and the Malay language. The influential Srivijaya kingdom has unified the various ethnic groups in southeast Asia into a converging the cultural sphere for almost a millennium. It was during that time that vast borrowing of Sanskrit words and concepts, led to advanced linguistic development of Malay as a language. Malay is the regional lingua franca, and Malay-based pidgins exist in most trading ports in Indonesia (see Malay-based creoles). On the other hand, the Malay presence in the Philippines might be mainly due to migrations in the late first millennium AD.

In this broad sense, the term Malay also includes most ethnic groups in the Philippines and Indonesia west of Papua. It is best understood as a cultural, not racial grouping. For example, people of the Maluku and Nusa Tenggara islands up to Timor have darker skin but are more readily described as Malays than the Dayaks of inner Borneo.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Ethnic group vs. cultural sphere", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki