| Cocos Islands Malay | |
| Nativename: | Basa Pulu Cocos/Basa Pulu Keling |
| States: | Australia, Malaysia |
| Region: | Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Sabah |
| Ethnicity: | 4,000 in Malaysia (2000) |
| Speakers: | in Australia |
| Date: | 1987–2012 |
| Ref: | e25 |
| Script: | Latin (Malay alphabet) |
| Familycolor: | creole |
| Fam2: | Malay-based creole |
| Iso3: | coa |
| Glotto: | coco1260 |
| Glottorefname: | Cocos Islands Malay |
Cocos Malay is a post-creolized variety of Malay, spoken by the Cocos Malays of Home Island, Christmas Island, and those originally from the Cocos Islands currently living in Sabah.
Cocos Malay derives from the Malay trade languages of the 19th century, specifically the Betawi language.[1] Malay is offered as a second language in schools, and Malaysian has prestige status; both are influencing the language, bringing it more in line with standard Malay.[2] There is also a growing influence of English, considering the Islands having been an Australian territory and globalization drifting modern terms into the daily parlance. In 2009, Cocos Malay students were prohibited from using their own language and failure to comply resulted in punishment in the form of "speaking tickets" which meant that they were required to carry out cleaning duties in school.[3] However, this form of language restriction ended by 2011.[4]
The first Cocos Malays were slaves brought to the then uninhabited Cocos (Keeling) Islands in 1826 by Alexander Hare and John Clunies-Ross. Most Malay slaves were mainly obtained in Malacca and in Banjarmasin, but they originally came from all over Indonesia, and the language that they spoke among each other was a form of Malay.[5] Given that Malay was the lingua franca or trade language throughout Maritime Southeast Asia at the time, it is likely that the slaves spoke some form of pidgin Malay. Between 1857 and 1910 the Clunies-Ross family also brought in a large number of Javanese laborers from Banten, Central Java and Madura. The Javanese laborers were called "Bantamese" to distinguish them from the Malays who had previously inhabited the island. Nowadays, the Javanese language spoken by their ancestors has largely been lost in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, although some words have entered the Cocos Malay.
It has the following characteristics:
Cocos Malay exhibits lexical items and Dutch loanwords that are common in Indonesian and Betawi(Jakartan Malay) but rarely used in Malay. Therefore, Cocos Malay is considered to be a Malay-derived creole derived from Betawi, although Cocos Malay does not have strucutual features in common with Betawi as -a change to -è and transitive suffix -in.
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i | u | |
| Mid | e | ə | o |
| Low | a | ||
| Plosive & affricate | p b | t̪ | d | tʃ dʒ | k g | (ʔ) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | |||||
| Fricative | s | ʁ | (h)2 | ||||||
| Approximant | w | j | |||||||
| Lateral approximant | l |
There are three ways in which Cocos Malay differs from Standard Malay and Indonesian:
| Standard Malay | Cocos Malay | English Gloss | |
|---|---|---|---|
| [ˈhisap˺] | [ˈisap˺] | 'suck' | |
| [ˈhuta̪ n] | [ˈuta̪ n] | 'forest' | |
| [ˈhiduŋ] | [ˈiduŋ] | 'nose' | |
| [ˈhaus] | [ˈaus] | 'thirsty' |