- ISO 639
ms- Its own name
- Melayu
- Script
- Latin
- Direction
- Left to right
Malay
Malay (Melayu) is spoken by 40.2M people across 5 territories in CLDR, and is official nationally in 3 of them. Malaysia holds 64% of its speakers. One translation covers all of it, which is why localization is planned by language and launched by market.
At a glance
What one translation into Malay buys, before anyone argues about which market to enter first.
Speakers
40.2M
Malaysia 64% · Indonesia 32% · Singapore 2%
First and second language speakers, summed across the 5 territories CLDR records. The bar splits them by territory, largest first.
Online speakers
36.1M
0%100%
90% of speakers, once each territory's speaker count is scaled by its World Bank internet rate. Territories with no internet figure contribute nothing, so this is a floor.
Concentration
64%
0%100%
The largest single territory, Malaysia, holds 64% of speakers. Spread out enough that regional wording and currency will come up.
Territories
5
3 where it is official nationally, 3 where at least one person in five speaks it. The rest are diaspora and minority populations, which CLDR does record.
Reachable GDP
$5.8T
Combined GDP of every territory where the language appears at all. An upper bound on the market, not a revenue forecast: it counts the whole economy, not the speakers' share of it.
Translation rate
1.00×
1.0×1.6×+
Prices at the mainstream per-word rate used across this site's estimators.
Where Malay is spoken
Every territory CLDR records, largest speaker count first. Share is of that territory's own population, so the column does not add up to anything.
| Territory | Share of that market | Speakers | Online | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MalaysiaMY | 75% | 25.9M | 25.4M | official |
| IndonesiaID | 5% | 13M | 9.4M | minority or diaspora |
| SingaporeSG | 14% | 844K | 796.5K | official |
| BruneiBN | 98% | 482.1K | 464.2K | official |
| Cocos (Keeling) IslandsCC | 84% | 498 | — | major |
The long tail matters. CLDR does record diaspora populations, so a language usually appears in more territories than its home markets, at small shares. Those rows rarely justify a launch on their own. They are why a language's total reach is larger than any one country page shows. A dash in the online column means the territory has no World Bank internet figure, and it does not mean zero.
What it takes to ship
The work that is not translation: the writing system, the grammar your message format has to survive, and what the words cost.
Writing system
Latin
Lays out left to right, the same as the source. Platform default fonts cover this script.
Plural categories
1
No grammatical plural agreement, so counted messages need one arm.
Rate index
1.00×
Prices at the mainstream per-word rate.