The influence of Portuguese on the Malay language
Manuel Teixeira’s 1962 article traces the Portuguese lexical imprint on Malay from the sixteenth-century arrival of the Portuguese at Malacca through the Dutch colonial period, arguing that what began as a locally confined linguistic intrusion in the Moluccas and Batavia was disseminated into the general Malay written language by the nineteenth-century Malay-Chinese press.
Summary
Teixeira opens by situating Malay as the pre-existing lingua franca of the Archipelago, already laden with Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian borrowings, and notes that the Portuguese simply exploited this situation for their trade and missionary purposes (pp. 95–96). He then reconstructs the social mechanism through which Portuguese entered Malay: the mardijker and mixtiezen communities of mixed descent who formed around the colonial settlements, and the Batavia creole that persisted long after the Dutch had expelled the Portuguese from the Moluccas. The Dutch East India Company, he argues, tolerated Portuguese in Batavia partly for pragmatic trade reasons and partly because Portuguese was the most effective medium for Protestant preaching to the Indian and Balinese slave population, whereas in the Moluccas Malay served that function (pp. 97–98).
The article then surveys the geographic spread of the borrowing—strongest in Ambonese Malay, present in Tettumic and Timorese Malay, and absent from the written literary register—and identifies the vector by which words such as lemari, bendera, minggu, greja, and sekolah entered the general language: the Batavianised colloquial Malay of the newspaper press (pp. 99–100). A brief note on administrative and military terminology (petur, algoju, baluwarti, tronko) rounds out the discussion before the article turns to its two extensive word lists: roughly two hundred Malay entries with Portuguese etyma, and about twenty-five Portuguese entries borrowed from Malay (pp. 101–107).
Key Findings
- The Portuguese lexical layer in Malay is estimated at approximately 200 words in the article’s list, spanning domestic vocabulary, religious terms, military/administrative language, and botanical names (pp. 101–107).
- Ambonese Malay retains a set of Portuguese words absent elsewhere in the language, including fresko, forsa, kadera, kentar, pastiu, pardidu, kunyado, and kompader/komader (p. 99).
- The Dutch proclamation of 1659 by Ryklof van Goens in Ceylon ordered hair-cutting and hat prohibition for those unable to speak Dutch, aimed at suppressing Portuguese (p. 99).
- A 1680 order after the Spanish departure from Ternate discouraged Spanish use “because the Malay language was not lacking there,” while Portuguese was permitted in Batavia for Protestant preaching (p. 98).
- David Haex’s 1631 Malaico-Latin dictionary included a list of “Lusitanic” words in use in the Moluccas, retained in the 1717 second edition, though many had fallen into disuse by then (p. 99).
- The reverse borrowing list includes Malay-to-Portuguese transfers such as amouco (amok), duriao (durian), orangutan, tuaca (tuak), and bandara (bendahara) (p. 107).
Conclusion
Teixeira’s definitive point is that the Portuguese influence on Malay was structurally limited by the Protestant character of the Dutch successors, who checked the flow of religious and ecclesiastical vocabulary that had penetrated so freely elsewhere; what survived was a secular, everyday lexicon that the colonial press then naturalised into the standard language.
Context
- The article draws on Drewes, Schuchardt’s creole studies, and Haex’s 1631 dictionary as its principal secondary sources; no original archival collection is explored.
- Historiographically, it represents a mid-twentieth-century descriptive-lexical approach to contact linguistics in Southeast Asia, predating the more systematic sociolinguistic treatments of Malay creoles that followed.