Extended grammar: Malay and the Arabic tradition

Throughout history, a number of languages have achieved the status of learned language, i.e., a language included in the curriculum of an educational system without yielding any communicational benefits. In large parts of the Islamic world, Arabic was (and still is) such a learned language. Acquisition of the learned language took place through the memorization of texts, with instruction and/or translation in vernacular languages. The vernacular languages themselves were not deemed to be in need of grammatical description, which explains why grammars for them were late to be developed. The present paper focuses on Malay, the lingua franca of choice in Southeast Asia for both Muslim missionaries and British and Dutch colonial administrators, while serving as the auxiliary language in the Islamic curriculum. The first grammars of Malay were published by the British and Dutch. Malay grammars written by native speakers did not make their appearance until the nineteenth century. Their main representative is Raja Ali Haji (d. probably 1873). In his Bustān al-kātibīn, he used the grammatical framework of Arabic grammar for a grammatical sketch of Malay, using in part the Malay terminology that had been developed in traditional education for the study of Arabic grammar and Qurʾānic exegesis. ; À travers les siècles certaines langues ont fonctionné comme des langues savantes, c’est-à-dire des langues enseignées dans les écoles pour leur valeur culturelle intrinsèque, mais sans pour autant constituer une langue de communication. Dans le monde islamique, l’arabe a longtemps servi comme langue savante, dont l’acquisition se faisait sous la forme de mémorisation de textes joints à leur traduction dans la langue vernaculaire, qui servait comme langue d’instruction dans les écoles. Dans le présent article, nous prenons comme point de départ la position de l’arabe en Asie du Sud-Est, où le malais, tout en fonctionnant comme langue d’instruction dans les écoles, fut choisi par l’administration coloniale comme langue ...