Malay is spoken by about 34 million people. Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore only. Indonesian is a standardised register of the same language and is counted in its own row.
On our measured language map, its closest relatives are Indonesian, Sundanese and Banjarese. If you speak one of those, much of the vocabulary will feel familiar from day one.
Structurally, verbs usually come before their objects.
Every lesson is built from 2,000 real Malay sentences, aligned with their translations word by word and piece by piece, so you always see how the sentence actually works instead of memorizing flashcards. The grammar is discovered from the sentences themselves, 1,437 patterns so far, and a spaced-repetition quiz teaches it in the order that unlocks the most of the language first. Our measured estimate for reaching conversational level from English is about 925 hours of study. Read how it works.
Speaker figures follow Ethnologue and national censuses, rounded; the difficulty estimate is calibrated against U.S. Foreign Service Institute data.