Cocos Malay is a post-creolized variety of Malay spoken by the Cocos Malay people of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Christmas Island, Australian territories in the Indian Ocean, as well as by diaspora communities in Sabah, Malaysia. It derives from the Malay trade languages of the nineteenth century, particularly Betawi, with added influence from Javanese and Sundanese, and developed among enslaved and indentured workers brought to the previously uninhabited islands beginning in 1826 by Alexander Hare and John Clunies-Ross, with further Javanese laborers arriving between 1857 and 1910. Roughly 1,100 native speakers were documented between 1987 and 2012.
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