Malay is an official language of Brunei and Malaysia, and one of the official languages in Singapore.

Malay refers to a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia,Singapore, and southern Thailand.

Malay is an official language of Brunei and Malaysia, and one of the official languages in Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. In Malaysia, the language is now officially known as Bahasa Malaysia ("Malaysian language"), though constitutionally it is called Bahasa Melayu. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language").

There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembangin southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.

The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.

Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of Malay ethnic.

In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia, which was introduced by the National Language Act of 1967, was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Bahasa Melayu is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. However, at present day, Malaysians prefer to identify their national language as Bahasa Malaysia once again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.

Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.

Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay.

The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.