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Malay Affixes: meN-, ber-, -kan and -an Without the Jargon

Malay builds most of its verbs and nouns with affixes. What each common prefix and suffix does, and how the sound changes actually work.

By Published 7 min read

Reign Creative LLC makes Learn Malay - Bahasa Melayu, which this article links to, so we have a commercial interest in it. How we write and check articles.

Key takeaways

  • Malay puts almost no grammar on the ends of words for tense, number or gender, and puts a great deal of it into affixes attached to a root.
  • The meN- prefix changes shape to match the sound that follows it, and absorbs an initial p, t, k or s while leaving b, d, j and g in place.
  • The suffixes -kan and -i both make a verb take an object, but they point at different things: -kan usually adds a thing acted on or a beneficiary, -i usually adds a place or a surface.
  • peN-, pe-...-an and ke-...-an turn one root into a person, a process and an abstract quality, which is why a single root can fill half a dictionary page.
  • The fastest way to read an unfamiliar Malay word is to strip the affixes off it and look for the root you already know.

You learn that beli means buy. Then you walk past a shop and the sign says pembelian, the receipt says dibeli, the notice in the window says membeli, and the person at the counter is a pembeli. Four words, one root, and three of them are not in your head.

Malay does not conjugate for tense, person or number, and it has no grammatical gender. What it does instead is attach affixes to a root, and those affixes carry the work an English speaker expects to find in verb endings, auxiliaries and word order. Learn the root, learn roughly a dozen affix jobs, and a word you have never seen becomes readable on sight.

The root is the unit worth memorising

Malay roots are short, usually two syllables, and they are what a dictionary is organised around. Beli, tulis, jalan, makan, besar, kerja.

Everything else is built on top of them. This is the opposite of the situation in a language with case endings, where a word's forms have to be learned as a set. In Malay you learn one form and then learn the machinery that generates the rest, and the machinery is finite.

The practical consequence for a beginner is that your vocabulary is larger than you think it is. If you know tulis, you already hold most of menulis (to write), penulis (a writer), tulisan (writing, a piece of text) and ditulis (was written). Nobody has shown you how to unlock them yet.

meN-: the prefix that changes shape

This is the one that makes Malay look harder than it is, because it is written five or six different ways.

meN- marks an agent-focused verb: the doer is the subject. But the nasal sound at the end of the prefix assimilates to whatever consonant starts the root, and in some cases swallows it.

Root starts with Prefix becomes Example
a vowel, or g, h, kh meng- ajar to mengajar, teach; gulung to menggulung, roll
k meng-, k absorbed kenal to mengenal, know or recognise
b, f, v mem- beli to membeli, buy
p mem-, p absorbed pilih to memilih, choose
c, d, j, sy, z men- dukung to mendukung, support; cabut to mencabut, pull out
t men-, t absorbed tulis to menulis, write
s meny-, s absorbed sapu to menyapu, sweep
l, m, n, ny, ng, r, w, y me- layang to melayang, glide; rampas to merampas, seize
one-syllable roots menge- bom to mengebom, bomb

Stare at that table for a moment and a single rule falls out of it: the voiceless consonants p, t, k and s get absorbed, and their voiced partners b, d, j and g survive. Beli keeps its b in membeli. Pilih loses its p in memilih.

That is the whole pattern, and it is the one thing here worth committing to memory, because it also tells you how to run the process backwards. A word beginning mem- followed immediately by a vowel almost certainly has a root starting with p.

ber-, ter- and di-: the three you meet next

ber- attaches mostly to nouns and adjectives and produces something closer to "to have" or "to be in the state of". Kerja, work, gives bekerja, to work. Jalan, road, gives berjalan, to walk. It shortens to be- before a root starting with r or whose first syllable contains er, which is why it is bekerja and not berkerja. Ajar is irregular and gives belajar, to study.

ter- marks something that happened without anyone choosing it, or a resulting state. Buka, open, gives terbuka, open in the sense of having been opened. Makan, eat, gives termakan, eaten by accident. When you see ter-, expect "accidentally", "suddenly" or "already".

di- is patient focus, the form usually translated into English as a passive. This is the affix a traveller meets first, because it is all over public signage. Dilarang merokok: smoking is prohibited. Dibeli: was bought. If you take one thing from this section, take this — a word starting di- is telling you something is being done to the thing named, frequently by an authority that has not named itself.

The two suffixes people mix up

Both -kan and -i make a verb transitive. They do not do it the same way.

-kan usually introduces the thing acted on, or a beneficiary. Membeli is to buy; membelikan is to buy something for someone. Besar is big; membesarkan is to enlarge, to make something big.

-i usually introduces a place, surface or target that the action lands on. Duduk is to sit; menduduki is to occupy or sit on. Naik is to go up; menaiki is to board.

An honest warning: the distinction is real but it is not fully predictable. Plenty of roots take one and not the other for reasons that are historical rather than logical, and the reliable way to acquire them is in phrases, from reading, rather than off a rule sheet. Anyone offering you a clean rule here is selling a simplification.

The noun-making family

Three patterns turn the same root into three different nouns, and once you can see them the dictionary stops looking so long.

  • peN- makes a person or an instrument, and assimilates exactly like meN-: beli to pembeli (buyer), tulis to penulis (writer), sapu to penyapu (broom).
  • pe-...-an and per-...-an make a process or a place: beli to pembelian (purchase), jalan to perjalanan (a journey), kerja to pekerjaan (a job).
  • ke-...-an makes an abstract quality, and sometimes an accidental event: bersih (clean) to kebersihan (cleanliness), sihat (healthy) to kesihatan (health), hilang (lost) to kehilangan (a loss).

Reduplication belongs to the same toolkit even though it is not an affix. Buku (book) gives buku-buku (books); kanak gives kanak-kanak (children). It marks plurality, variety or intensity depending on the word, and it is one of the reasons Malay gets away with having no plural ending at all.

What our course does with this, and what it costs

Learn Malay - Bahasa Melayu introduces roots without affixes for the first three units. Greetings, numbers, family, food, basic questions: all of it is built from bare roots and short sentences, because a beginner handed the assimilation table in week one usually stops.

That decision has a real cost and we should be straightforward about it. Real Malay signage is affixed from the moment you land. Dilarang masuk, pembelian tiket, perkhidmatan pelanggan, berhenti — a learner three units in can say a fair amount and read almost none of it. That gap has been reported to us and the complaint is fair.

Our answer is that the gap closes faster than the alternative one does. A learner who already has fifty root words meets membeli as a modification of something familiar; a learner who met membeli first has to store it whole and gains nothing when pembelian turns up. But if you are travelling next month rather than studying for a year, skip deliberately ahead to the affix lessons and the di- and ter- signage vocabulary. That is a better use of a fortnight than another unit of food nouns, and the travel phrase list is built for exactly that compressed case.

The grammar lessons in the app cover word order, pronouns, possession, questions, classifiers, reduplication, passive forms and the affix system, explained on Malay terms rather than mapped onto English ones. There is no hearts or lives system, so getting the assimilation wrong repeatedly does not lock you out of a lesson. That matters more here than anywhere else in the course.

A reading procedure that works immediately

When you hit a word you do not know:

  1. Strip the prefix. meng-, mem-, men-, meny-, me-, ber-, ter-, di-, pe-, ke-.
  2. Strip the suffix. -kan, -i, -an.
  3. Restore the absorbed consonant if the prefix was mem-, men-, meng- or meny- and what remains starts with a vowel. Memilih gives pilih. Menulis gives tulis. Menyapu gives sapu.
  4. Look up what is left. That is the root, and the dictionary is organised around it.
  5. Read the affixes back on as meaning. Who is doing it (meN-), what it is being done to (di-), whether it was deliberate (ter-), and whether the word names a person, a process or a quality (peN-, pe-...-an, ke-...-an).

This takes about four seconds once it is habit, and it converts Malay from a language where every unfamiliar word is a wall into one where most unfamiliar words are a known word wearing a hat.

If the sounds rather than the structure are the problem, the Malay pronunciation guide deals with the spelling-to-sound patterns and the places they misbehave. For where this system sits relative to Indonesian, which shares it almost exactly, see Malay vs Indonesian. Our other beginner courses are listed under language learning, and the wider set of language articles sits under language learning articles.

Good to know

Frequently asked questions

What does the meN- prefix do in Malay?
It marks a verb as agent-focused, so the one performing the action is the subject of the sentence. It is written as meng-, mem-, men-, meny-, me- or menge- depending on the first sound of the root, which is why the same prefix looks different on every word. Beli becomes membeli, tulis becomes menulis, and sapu becomes menyapu.
Why does the p disappear in memilih?
Because meN- assimilates. The nasal at the end of the prefix takes the place of articulation of the root's first consonant, and when that consonant is one of the voiceless set p, t, k or s it is absorbed into the nasal rather than kept. So pilih becomes memilih, not mempilih. Voiced consonants survive: beli becomes membeli with the b intact.
What is the difference between the suffixes -kan and -i?
Both turn a verb into one that takes an object, but they typically select different kinds of object. The suffix -kan tends to introduce a thing being acted on or a person being done a favour, as in membelikan, to buy something for someone. The suffix -i tends to introduce a place, surface or target that the action applies to, as in menduduki, to occupy or sit on. The distinction is real, but it is learned root by root rather than from a rule alone.
Can you speak Malay without using affixes?
You can be understood. Colloquial spoken Malay drops a great many affixes, and a beginner who says saya beli rather than saya membeli will be followed perfectly well. What you cannot do without affixes is read. Signage, official notices, newspapers and anything in the standard register use affixed forms constantly, so the system is a reading requirement long before it is a speaking one.
Are Malay and Indonesian affixes the same?
The system is shared, and the core affixes behave the same way in both standards. Where the two diverge is in which derived words are in common use and in some spelling conventions, which is a vocabulary difference rather than a difference in the grammar itself.

Sources

  1. Malay grammar (opens in a new tab)Wikipedia — accessed
  2. Affix (opens in a new tab)Wikipedia — accessed
  3. Reduplication (opens in a new tab)Wikipedia — accessed

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