Penang Malay 
r A. W. HamiLton. 
To any one whose knowledge of Malay has been acquired from 
the various text books on the subject, with their correct orthogra- 
phy, it comes as rather a shock to find, on arrival in Penang, that 
he is unable to follow even the simplest conversation between two 
natives of the place, and that his own Malay, although understood, 
is not the colloquial of the Northern Settlement. 
Before long, however, the stranger begins to observe that his 
difficulties lie in well defined directions; and that the body of the 
language remains much the same as that to which he has been 
accustomed, so that after a few months the newcomer should have 
little trouble in conversing in the same strain as his hearers. ‘The 
differences between the so-called “ Penang Malay,” which is really 
the Malay of Kedah altered slightly to suit the needs of a cos- 
mopolitan town population with a large element of Southern 
Indians from the Madras Presidency, and “ Singapore Malay,” 
which is a similar corruption of the speech of Johore to meet the 
requirements of a busy mart dealing with many races and much in- 
fluenced by its proximity to Java, come mainly under six heads :— 
1. Harshness in pronunciation. 
6G ieee 
2.° The alteration of a final “1” into “4 
3. The clipping of certain common words. 
4+. The use of peculiar idioms and idiomatic constructions. 
5. The use of words not in common use elsewhere, or con- 
fined in use to Kedah. 
6. The inclusion of words of Indian origin sometimes to the 
exclusion of native Malay words. 
1. Dealing with the above seriatim, in Johore Malay the pro- 
nunciation is always soft, especially that of a final syllable, so 
much so indeed that a final a is never pronounced as the long a in 
father but dies away as the sound of the er in the same word, so 
that father could he transcribed as fa tha to a reader of romanised 
Malay in Johore. In Penang speech on the other hand the letter 
a is always given its full sound of a long a@ or ah even at the end of 
a word, so that apa (a pa) “ what” w ith its mute final a in J ohore, 
becomes @ pa; mana, “where ” becomes ma na; diva “he ” becomes 
did; raja“ a king” becomes ra ja. In Johore the letter r though 
pronounced distinctly js never rolled as in Javanese and when 
appearing as a final is pronounced ever so shghtly, so that kotor 
“dirty ” could almost be written as ko taw, and akar “ aroot” aka 
Jour. Straits Branch R. A. Soc., No. 85, 1922. 
