Bahasa Melayu is the constitutional name of Malaysia's national language, sometimes also called Bahasa Malaysia. The standard is based on the Johor-Riau dialect of Malay, the prestige variety of the old sultanates at the southern end of the Malay peninsula. As an Austronesian language it works quite differently from European ones: words carry no grammatical gender, verbs do not change for tense, and new words are built with prefixes and suffixes around a root, so "ajar", meaning teach, gives "belajar", to learn, and "pelajar", a student. Bahasa Melayu is written in the Latin alphabet for official purposes, while the Arabic-based Jawi script keeps ceremonial and religious uses. It is the language of Malaysian schooling, government and broadcasting, spoken alongside English, Chinese varieties and Tamil in a thoroughly multilingual society.
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