The Indigenous Languages of Sabah and Sarawak: Borneo's Main Language Families

Fly over the interior of Borneo and you cross more languages in an hour than most countries hold in total. A river valley in Sabah’s highlands, a longhouse on the upper Baram in Sarawak, a coastal fishing village — each may greet you in a tongue the next valley barely understands.

Sabah and Sarawak together are home to the large majority of Malaysia’s indigenous languages. This article is a map of the main groups: not every language — there are far too many — but the families that linguists use to make sense of the diversity, described factually and with respect for the communities who speak them.

One family tree, many branches

Almost all the indigenous languages of the two Borneo states belong to a single great family: Austronesian. It is one of the largest language families on earth, stretching from Madagascar through the Malay world to the Pacific, and it includes Malay itself.

Within Austronesian, most Bornean languages are placed by linguists in a North Bornean branch, which is then subdivided into smaller families. This grouping is the work of standard linguistic reference works such as Ethnologue and Glottolog, not an official Malaysian government classification — Malaysia does not publish a formal genetic tree of these languages, so the family names below are a scholarly framework rather than a legal one.

A word of caution runs through everything that follows: the line between a “language” and a “dialect” is drawn differently by different sources. That is why there is no single official count of how many indigenous languages exist. What official Malaysian sources do confirm is the scale, and the identity of the largest communities.

Sabah: Dusunic, Murutic, Paitanic and Sama-Bajau

The Sabah state government describes the state’s population as 33 indigenous groups communicating in more than 50 languages and around 80 dialects. A large share of Malaysia’s indigenous languages are found in Sabah alone.

Linguists commonly sort Sabah’s indigenous languages into a small number of families:

Family	Spoken by (examples)	Notes
Dusunic	Kadazan, Dusun, Rungus, Lotud, Bisaya	The largest family; the central Kadazandusun language has dialect chains across the west coast and interior
Murutic	Murut and related peoples	Found in southern Sabah and across the border into Sarawak and Kalimantan
Paitanic	Communities around the Paitan and lower Kinabatangan	Smaller family of the northeast and interior
Sama-Bajau	Bajau (“Sama”) communities	The languages of Sabah’s coastal Bajau; classified separately from the three above

According to the Sabah state government, the Kadazan-Dusun are the largest ethnic group in the state, with the Bajau the second largest and the Murut the third. The label “Kadazan-Dusun” itself unites two closely related communities, and the standardised school language built on it is written Kadazandusun.

Sarawak: Iban, Bidayuh, Melanau and the Orang Ulu

Across the border, Sarawak’s diversity is organised differently. In the 2020 Census, the Department of Statistics Malaysia recorded the largest Sarawak Bumiputera groups as the Iban, followed by the Bidayuh and the Melanau — with many smaller communities beyond them.

Their languages spread across several families:

Family	Spoken by (examples)	Notes
Malayic	Iban	Iban is the most widely spoken indigenous language of Sarawak; it sits in the same broad Malayic group as Malay
Bidayuhic (Land Dayak)	Bidayuh	A cluster of related languages and dialects, varying markedly from one area to the next
Melanau-Kajang	Melanau, Kajang, Kanowit and others	Concentrated along the central Sarawak coast and rivers
North Sarawakan	Kayan, Kenyah, Kelabit, Lun Bawang, Berawan and others	The upriver “Orang Ulu” languages of the interior highlands
Punan / Penan	Penan and related communities	Languages of communities historically living in the deep forest

The Orang Ulu (“upriver people”) are not one people or one language. The term is an umbrella covering many small interior communities — the Kayan, Kenyah, Kelabit, Lun Bawang, Penan and others — each with its own tongue. Likewise, Dayak is a collective term embracing the Iban, Bidayuh and other communities who share the Gawai Dayak harvest festival, not the name of a single language.

Ethnic group and language are not the same thing

It is tempting to read the population tables above as a list of languages. They are not, quite.

An ethnic group and a language overlap but do not map one-to-one. A single group may speak several dialects that shade into separate languages; neighbouring groups may share much of a language; and a community’s name in a census may cover more linguistic variety than one label suggests. This is exactly why the “language versus dialect” caveat matters, and why counts differ between sources.

For the constitutional and statistical frame that sits above all of this — how Bahasa Melayu is the national language while these tongues are protected for private use — see Malaysia’s languages, official and otherwise.

How these languages live today

A language survives when it is used, and several of Borneo’s are taught and standardised.

Kadazandusun is the clearest case. Under the Ministry of Education’s Pupil’s Own Language (POL) programme, it has been taught in Sabah government schools since a pilot that began in 1997, starting with Year Four pupils. The Sabah government’s own account stresses that the “Kadazandusun” taught in schools is a language — a standardised medium built for the classroom — distinct from the ethnic labels “Kadazan” and “Dusun”. Work on the language has been coordinated by the Kadazandusun Language Foundation (KLF), a non-governmental research body dedicated to preserving and developing it.

Iban, as Sarawak’s largest indigenous language, is likewise taught in the state’s schools under the POL framework. Other languages, such as Bidayuh and the Peninsular Orang Asli language Semai, have also been offered where there is demand. POL subjects are typically electives, subject to a minimum class size and to parents requesting them — so availability varies from school to school.

Beyond the classroom, these languages carry the daily and ceremonial life of their communities: the greetings of Kaamatan in Sabah, the longhouse rituals of Gawai in Sarawak, oral histories, songs and prayers that have no written substitute.

Common misunderstandings

“There’s one ‘native language’ in Sabah and one in Sarawak.” No. Each state holds dozens of distinct languages across several families. Sabah’s government alone counts more than 50 languages and around 80 dialects.

“Kadazandusun, Dayak and Orang Ulu are single languages.” They are not. “Kadazandusun” is a standardised language built from closely related Kadazan and Dusun speech; “Dayak” and “Orang Ulu” are collective terms covering many peoples and tongues.

“These are dialects of Malay.” Almost all are Austronesian, the same broad family as Malay, but most belong to separate North Bornean branches and are not mutually intelligible with Malay. Iban is the closest, sitting in the wider Malayic group, yet it is still its own language.

“Indigenous languages have no place in the school system.” Several are formally taught. Kadazandusun has been a school subject since 1997 and Iban is taught in Sarawak, both under the Pupil’s Own Language programme.

What’s next

• Read Malaysia’s languages, official and otherwise for how the national language and these indigenous tongues sit within the Federal Constitution.
• See Sabah and Sarawak for the two states whose communities speak these languages.
• Explore Gawai Dayak and Kaamatan, the harvest festivals where many of these languages are heard in ceremony — and Orang Asli for the separately classified indigenous peoples and languages of Peninsular Malaysia.

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This article is classified as sensitive (3R+1: race) under the NegaraKu.md editorial policy because it describes indigenous communities and their languages. It is written strictly descriptively — recording how official Malaysian sources count these communities and how standard linguistic references group their languages — without evaluation or characterisation, and it remains a draft until reviewed and verified by a human reviewer.