A long time ago we posted about the funny ways that they spell English loanwords here. We’ve noticed a couple more, and we’ve included them before.
empayar The British had one, and Malaysia was a part of it.
falasafah Plato or Aristotle.
kartrij Toner comes in this.
seksyen A part of something.
wayar If you have wireless, you don’t need this to connect to the internet.
We’ll keep our eyes out for more. Currently we’re having a tough time trying to get our “Malay chops” back. As we’ve noted before, we developed a Jakartinese slang when we lived in Indonesia that is actually quite noticeable to locals in both Indonesia and Malaysia. We use vocab words that Malays never use, such as mengerti for “to understand” instead of faham. We use Indonesian pronunciations of words rather than Malay ones, saying saya as SIGH-yah, instead of SIGH-yuh. We use little particles like nggak for “not” instead of tak. Many sentences in Malay are almost totally different than they would be in Indonesian. The classic example is “you can speak bahasa?”
Yu boleh cakap Melayu? (Malay)
Anda bisa berbahasa Indonesia? (Indonesian)
At any rate, we’re trying our very hardest to get back into the Malay swing of things. It’s not easy, and unfortunately, since we’re not going to be here very long, by the time we’re all set we’ll have to get used to another accent: Australian.