by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/08/26 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/08/26/10054522.aspx
The Malay (Brunei Darussalam) Windows 7 Language Interface Pack is live!
You can download it from here.
Please note that the Malay (Brunei Darussalam) Windows 7 LIP can only be installed on a system that runs an English client version of Windows 7. It is available to download for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.
A LITTLE BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON MALAY (BRUNEI DARUSSALAM):
NUMBER OF SPEAKERS:
47 million speakers
NAME IN THE LANGUAGE ITSELF:
Bahasa Melayu
The Malay language is official language in Malaysia and Brunei where it is spoken by about 23 million people. In Brunei, Singapore, southern Thailand, and the southern Philippines it is called Bahasa Melayu "Malay language". "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
It is a variant of a language diasystem, having its counterpart in the Indonesian language. Malay/Indonesian was a trade language since at least a thousand years on the Malaysian peninsula and the Indonesian islands; the difference between the two languages started to form only in colonial times when today's Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore were formerly under British rule and were influenced by English while Indonesian was influenced by Dutch. The differences are still small enough to make both variants mutually intelligible.
The grammar of this agglutinative language is rather simple: There is no inflection for both nouns and verbs, no articles are used for nouns, only very few words (those borrowed from Sanskrit) have a grammatical gender, the plural mostly gets indicated by using a numeral (often with a classifier) or simple duplication (orang, person, orang-orang, people). There are only two different tenses for verbs: the present tense and a form of future tense.
FUN FACTS:
CLASSIFICATION:
Malay belongs to the Western Malayo-Polynesian languages, along with languages like Javanese, Balinese, which are spoken in Indonesia, Malagasy, spoken in Madagascar, or Tagalog, spoken in the Philippines. The Malayo-Polynesian languages form a subgroup of the Austronesian language family.
SCRIPT:
Malay is usually written in Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic alphabet (Jawi) also exists. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei.
You can learn more about Malay here.
Now all three flavors of this language have their LIPs released: this one, Indonesian, and Malay (Malaysia).
Enjoy!
Rob Margel on 27 Aug 2010 1:16 AM:
Michael - where can i download this from, canot see the link in the post.
Rob
Michael S. Kaplan on 27 Aug 2010 5:03 AM:
Oops, forgot to add the link! Added now (it's here).