Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, Singapore and Thailand.

Estimated around 18 million.

The Malay Language also known locally as Bahasa Melayu is a Malayo-Polynesian language, a subgroup of Austronesian language spoken by the Malay people who are native to the Malay Peninsula, southern Thailand, Singapore and parts of Sumatra. It is the official language of Malaysia and Brunei, and one of the four official languages of Singapore. It is also used as a working language in East Timor. In Singapore, Malay was historically the lingua franca among people of different races, but this has given way to English, but it retains the status of national language, and the national anthem, Majulah Singapura is entirely in Malay. In southern provinces of Thailand, Malay is spoken among the people remnant from ancient Malay kingdom called Pattani, but has no official status or recognition.

The Malayo-Polynesian (MP) languages are divided into two major subgroups, the Western MP and the Central-Eastern MP.

The Malayo-Polynesian languages tend to use reduplication (repetition of all or part of a word) to express the plural, and like other Austronesian languages have a low entropy; that is, the text is quite repetitive in terms of the frequency of sounds. The majority also lack consonant clusters (e.g., [str] or [mpt] in English). Most also have only a small set of vowels, five being a common number.

Western Malayo-Polynesian has 300 million speakers and includes Indonesian and Malay, Javanese, Malagasy, Tagalog, Ilocano and Cebuano, Buginese, as well as many others. Eastern Malayo-Polynesian has two subgroups: Polynesian and Micronesian. Micronesian includes the languages spoken by the native peoples of Micronesia such as Nauruan, Sama and Chamorro. Polynesian languages include Hawai'ian, Maori, Samoan, Tahitian, Tongan and Tuvaluan. All of the said languages except Hawai'ian have official status in the countries and territories of the Pacific Ocean. Collectively they are spoken by about 1 million people.