Tom G. Hoogervorst
This article investigates the Malay once spoken by Batavia’s Mardijker community, focusing on its orthography, phonology, lexical features, loanwords, and its relationship to other Malay varieties. In doing so, it foregrounds the Nieuwe Woordenschat (1780), a trilingual language manual written for a Dutch-speaking readership. This combined dictionary and phrasebook offers a rare snapshot of colloquial language, rather than the ‘correct’ Malay as defined by European and local scholars. Published in Batavia, the multi-ethnic capital of the Dutch-controlled East Indies, little is known about its compiler or the specific circumstances under which it was written. Given its use of creolised Malay and Portuguese, it was almost certainly produced with the involvement of the city’s diverse Mardijker community. A close examination of the book’s words and sentences reveals that Mardijker Malay existed within a heterogeneous linguistic landscape, incorporating speakers from different regional, socio-economic, and educational backgrounds. Its data offer insights into the broader linguistic history of Batavia and its surrounding areas, particularly with regard to the cultural, technological, economic, culinary, and religious vocabulary used by the resident speech communities. Its study elucidates the etymological origins of these terms and provides a window into the timeframe of language contact and lexical borrowing between the diverse communities that interacted in Java’s port cities under the Dutch East India Company. © 2025 Editors, Indonesia and the Malay World.
Royal Dutch Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Netherlands; Universitas Negeri Malang, Indonesia
