Some notes on the Kelantan dialect, and some comparisons with the dialects of Perak and central Pahang
A.J. Sturrock, a British colonial official stationed in Kelantan, published this dialectological note in the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1912, during the period immediately preceding the formal establishment of the British protectorate over the state. The article’s central thesis is that the Kelantan Malay dialect constitutes a markedly distinct variety from those of Perak and central Pahang, characterised by extensive Siamese lexical borrowing, idiosyncratic phonological reductions, and a set of clipped terminal affixes found nowhere else in the Malay-speaking world.
Summary
Sturrock organises his comparison along three axes: vocabulary, pronunciation, and distinct usages of word and phrase. He begins by establishing that Perak and central Pahang are relatively close to one another, while Kelantan diverges sharply from both. The personal pronoun system illustrates this gap: where Perak uses sahaya or teman for “I” and Pahang uses sahaya or kawan, Kelantan relies almost exclusively on hamba in colloquial speech, with sahaya so rare as to be probably an importation (p. 1). The polite second person in Kelantan is kita, a usage Sturrock has not observed elsewhere, while kamu is considered coarse and mu is reserved for addressing inferiors (pp. 1–2).
The vocabulary section is the article’s most substantial component. Sturrock compiles an unsystematic list of roughly sixty Kelantan terms with their standard Malay or English equivalents, drawn from everyday observation rather than formal elicitation (pp. 2–4). Among these, he identifies a cluster of words he is confident are Siamese in origin—jenaiah (criminal), utun (appeal), kweng (a title), guam (case), wat (temple), sam (court-house), and semayan (clerk)—and suspects further Siamese etymologies for senarai, gong, and gok (p. 4). The Chinese negative bo is also noted as being in quite common use (p. 4).
The pronunciation discussion reveals Kelantan’s most distinctive phonological features: the suppression of n before another consonant (so that Kelantan becomes Kelatan and jantan becomes jatan), the rendering of final -a as -aw (so mana becomes manaw), and the softening of final -ng into -m (so belakang becomes blakam) (pp. 4–5). Sturrock highlights a particularly striking consequence of these rules: in Kelantan pronunciation, the words Intan and Hitam become phonetically indistinguishable, a problem he connects to an earlier discussion by E.W. Birch and Hubert Berkeley regarding the etymology of the name Klian Intan (p. 5). He also documents a set of clipped terminal affixes—-dik/-dek, -gak, -teh, and the enigmatic keneh—whose functions range from intensification to what appears to be purely phatic, and which no informant could satisfactorily explain (pp. 6–7).
Key Findings
- The Kelantan colloquial first-person pronoun is hamba; sahaya, though present, is so uncommon it is probably an imported word, and teman (Perak) is entirely unknown in Kelantan (p. 1).
- Sturrock identifies at least seven confirmed Siamese loanwords in Kelantan Malay—jenaiah, utun, kweng, guam, wat, sam, semayan—and suspects additional Siamese origins for senarai, gong, and gok (p. 4).
- The suppression of n before a consonant and the nasalisation of final -an to -en render Intan and Hitam phonetically identical in Kelantan, making the etymology of Klian Intan permanently unresolvable on phonological grounds alone (p. 5).
- Kelantan possesses a set of clipped terminal affixes (-gak, -teh, -dik, keneh) with no clear semantic function; keneh in particular defies explanation, being used both interrogatively and as an expression of agreement (pp. 6–7).
- The Chinese negative bo is in quite common use in Kelantan, a feature not noted for Perak or Pahang (p. 4).
- The word serampang for “fork” is shared between Pahang and Kelantan, suggesting a possible common Northern Malay substrate distinct from Perak (p. 2).
Conclusion
Sturrock’s definitive takeaway is that the Kelantan dialect is “the least pure of all the Malay dialects I know,” owing to its heavy intermingling with Siamese and, to a lesser extent, Chinese elements (p. 2). He explicitly disclaims any claim to originality or exhaustiveness, and frames his contribution as a stimulus for further observation: his object “will be attained if the publication of these notes induces others to set down and publish the result of their observations,” which he regards as the only path to resolving the persistent difficulties of form and spelling in Northern Malay dialects (p. 7).
Context
- Sturrock was a British colonial administrator in Kelantan at the time of writing; his observations derive from everyday administrative and social contact rather than systematic linguistic fieldwork, and his list of vocabulary items is compiled “without system, just as they occurred to me or were brought to my notice” (p. 4).
- The article reflects the contemporary colonial assumption that Perak Malay was the standard to be imitated (“Perak is acknowledged to be the leader of fashion and to be worthy of imitation in most respects,” p. 1), a framing that positions Kelantan’s distinctiveness as deviation rather than independent development.