The Malay language has many loanwords from Sanskrit, Persian, Tamil, Greek, Latin, Portuguese, Dutch, and Chinese languages such as Hokkien. More recently, loans have come from Arabic, English and Malay's sister languages, Javanese and Sundanese. English loans are mostly related to trade, science and technology while Arabic loans are mostly religious as Arabic is the liturgical language of Islam, the religion of the majority of Malay speakers. However, many key words such as surga/syurga (heaven) and the word for "religion" itself (agama) have origins in Sanskrit. Javanese elements are incorporated from the variant of Malay used in Indonesia due to the influence of the Indonesian media.
While it is based on Malay, Indonesian has been strongly influenced by Javanese, as the Javanese are the largest ethnic group in Indonesia. Dutch influence over Indonesian vocabulary is highly significant, as Malay was adopted due to usefulness as a trading language during the Dutch East India Company's rule over the archipelago. This has led to approximately 10,000 Dutch words being borrowed into Indonesian. Malay as spoken in Malaysia (Bahasa Melayu) and Singapore, meanwhile, have more borrowings from English[1].
There are some words in Malay which are spelled exactly the same as the loan language, e.g. in English – museum (Indonesian), hospital (Malaysian), format, hotel, transit etc. By contrast, some Malay words have been loaned into other languages, e.g. in English – rice paddy ("padi"), orangutan, rattan, babirusa,[2] cockatoo,[3] compound,[4] gong, tuak, sago,[5][6] cootie,[7] amok, durian, agar, rambutan, keris, Pantoum/pantun,[8] "so long",[9] angrecum (anggrek/ anggrik), cassowary,[10] gingham, caddie, camphor (kapur), Gutta-percha (getah perca), launch, parang, sarong, dammar, and gambir.
Malay has also heavily influenced the forms of colloquial English spoken in Malaysia, also known as Manglish.
Some examples are as follows: