Bahasa Malaysia, also known as the Malay language or Bahasa Melayu, is the official language of Malaysia. It is also an official language in Brunei, and one of the four official languages of Singapore. It is similar to Bahasa Indonesia, with which it shares a common grammar, though with noted differences in the choice of words and vocabulary. For example, the word for "can" is boleh in Bahasa Malaysia, and bisa in Bahasa Indonesia, whereas bisa in Bahasa Malaysia means "poisonous". At times, this is a reflection of the branching out of vocabulary development, influenced in part by different colonial powers which affect some of the spellings in the language.
Within Malaysia itself, there are different regional variations or dialects to the Malay language. The standard Bahasa Malaysia as taught in schools is based on the Malay dialect of the Johor-Riau archipelago. It differs from the Malay spoken in other parts of the country. The difference is widest with Kelantanese Malay, which is so different from standard Bahasa Malaysia as to make it not mutually intelligible to a speaker of standard Bahasa Malaysia.
The Malay language was the lingua franca for the different communities residing in Malaya in the 19th century. At that time, Mandarin has not yet been adopted as a common language among the different Chinese groups in the country, so the Hokkien was not mutually intelligible with the Cantonese, the Hakka, and so on. As Malay was the language which the immigrants had to pick up to communicate with the locals, it was also the language they were forced to use when communicating between one Chinese dialect group with another. It was only in the early 20th century, with the widespread promotion of Mandarin, that it was commonly accepted as the lingua franca among the different dialect groups.
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