Malayan languages

The Malay or Malayan languages are a group of closely related languages spoken by Malays and related peoples across Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Southern Thailand and the far southern parts of the Philippines. They have traditionally been classified as Malay, Para-Malay, and Aboriginal Malay, but this reflects geography and ethnicity rather than a proper linguistic classification. The Malayan languages are mutually unintelligible to varying extents, though the distinction between language and dialect is unclear in many cases. According to Ethnologue 16, the varieties marked with an asterisk below are so closely related that they may prove to be dialects of a single Malay language.