THE SUPERIORITY OF MALAY LANGUAGE AND THE PIONEERING WORKS OF RAJI ALI HAJI

This paper elaborates on the superiority of Malay language and the pioneering works of Raja Ali Haji on developing and cultivating the language. Raja Ali Haji asserted that with language skills, humans can attain the status of a civilized human being with a noble character and useful knowledge. Thereby, the content of a language should represent the subtlety of its people. With that belief, Raja Ali Haji strived towards realizing it by codifying Malay language and managed to produce two works in the field of language: Bustan al-Katibin (1850), a book on spelling and grammar, and Kitab Pengetahuan Bahasa (A Book of Language Knowledge, 1858), a monolingual dictionary. Besides, he used to write works in various fields of science in a standard Malay. He was the first person to codify Malay. In a Dutch colonial education system, Malay that was developed by Raja Ali Haji was made as a reference for the introduction in education for the locals. In its prime, Malay was used as a weapon to fight against the Dutch colonialists and was later promoted as the national language of Indonesia as of October 28, 1928, under the name of the Indonesian language.