Essay About Malaysian Language

Malay is a language spoken in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, and Thailand. Malay comes from Austronesian languages which are divided into four groups. They are Indonesian, Malanesian, Autronesian, and Polynesian. Malay or Bahasa Melayu is a national language in Malaysia and it is used as a language instruction in education, in formal or informal settings or events. Malay and English language even differ in their origin and history. English comes from West-Germanic branch of Germanic in Indo-European family of languages. English was influenced by French, Latin, and Scandinavian. The brief historical background of the two languages show that they are not connected and their history are different. Because of that, there are quite a lot of differences between English and Malay language especially in terms of grammar.

There are two forms of the verb ‘be’, which is ‘was’ and ‘were’. ‘Was’ is used with a singular noun while ‘were’ is used for plural noun. Examples for ‘was’ and ‘were’ are, “She was reading at the library,” and “They were reading at the library,”. In English language, in order to form the simple past tense of regular verbs, you just have to add –ed to the base form. For example, in the sentence “He walked to school,”, the base form for walked is walk. However, there are special cases for irregular verbs such as sleep, teach, or send. Some irregular verbs had no changes whether in the present or past tense while some words had vowel changes such as slept and left. The irregular verbs that end with ‘d’ changes to ‘t’. For example, the past tense for the word ‘send’ is ‘sent’. While it can be quite confusing for the second language learner to learn about English past tense, there is no such thing in Malay language. In order to show an action in the past, you can just use the word ‘sudah’. For example, the word ‘sudah’ in “Saya sudah makan,” shows that I have already