Sarawak Malay (Standard Malay: Bahasa Melayu Sarawak or Bahasa Sarawak, Jawi:, Sarawak Malay: Kelakar Sarawak) is a Malayic language native to the State of Sarawak. It is a common language used by natives of Sarawak and also as the important mother tongue for the Sarawakian Malay people. This Malay variant is related to Bruneian Malay. The Sarawakian Malay language also bears strong similarities with the West Kalimantan Malay language around Sanggau, Sintang and Sekadau in the northern part of the West Kalimantan province of Indonesia.

Dialects

According to Asmah Haji Omar (1993), Sarawak Malay can be divided into three dialects which are:

Features

Sarawak Malay has features that are not found in Standard Malay, of which some of them are closer to colloquial Indonesian:

Vocabulary

Sarawak Malay has a rich vocabulary of which many words, while also found in Standard Malay, have completely different meanings. The numbers of Sarawak Malay differ a bit from their Standard Malay counterparts. The pronouns too differ quite significantly, with 1st and 2nd personal pronouns (both singular and plural) are both derived from 1st person plural pronouns (kami and kita in Standard Malay). Below is a non-exhaustive list of lexical differences between Standard Malay and Sarawak Malay. Many of the words used in Sarawak Malay nowadays were borrowed from many languages such as English. Some English words that have been borrowed and have undergone significant pronunciation changes are as follows:

Word formation

The word formation rules of Sarawak Malay are very different from those of the standard Malay language. Without prior exposure, most West Malaysians have trouble following Sarawakian conversations. Sabahan is also different from Sarawak Malay, however they do share some lexicon, such as the word Bah, which is used to stress a sentence. E.g.: Don't do like that - "Iboh polah kedak ya bah." It is similar in use to "lah" in Singlish and in West Malaysia. E.g.: Don't do like that 'lah'. Some words in Sarawakian Malay have a similar pronunciation of ai as ei, as in some districts of Perak: serai > serei, kedai > kedei. Some Sarawakian Malay verbs have a final glottal stop after a vowel or in place of final /r/: kena > kenak, air > aik, beri > berik. like in the Aboriginal Malay languages of West Malaysia. Many words in Sarawak Malay have diverged from their original pronunciations and some are totally different. Some examples include:

Colloquial and contemporary usage

Contemporary usage of Sarawak Malay includes contemporary Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation. E.g.: SMS language. E.g.:

Media

TVS, a regional television broadcaster serving Sarawak from the state government-owned Sarawak Media Group has programming tailored in the language.