The Malay language can dated long time ago as a member of the Western, or Indonesian, branch of the Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) language family, spoken as a native language by more than 33,000,000 persons distributed over the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Borneo, and the numerous smaller islands of the area.
It is currently now widely used in Malaysia and Indonesia as a second language. Malay shows the closest relationship to most of the other languages of Sumatra (Minangkabau, Kerintji and Rejang) and is clearly, but not so closely, related to the other Austronesian languages of Sumatra, Borneo, Java, and to the Cham languages of Vietnam.