Talk:Malaysians of Indonesian descent

Sunda people

Why there is no sunda word mention in this page? There are some people in malaysia that claimed themselves as a descendant of sunda people. 2404:8000:1027:85F6:3439:D988:E74:C454 (talk) 16:38, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

Infobox edit war

@AlhyarJy and MrCattttt: The current edit war surrounding the infobox parameter |population= is textbook poor editing (which both of you are notoriously best at). Read MOS:INFOBOXPURPOSE first. Nothing should be in the infobox that is mot mentioned in the main text.

So first of all, create a section "Population estimates" that discusses this controversial question. Second, consider the quality of sources. Okezone is a news site, and the page (which btw is a dead link as of now) only cites a claim by Idris Haron. We can mention this claim with attribution, but without an apparent source for Idris Haron's statement, we can only consider this guesswork. The same holds for the kompas.com figure of 80%, which is not even attributed to any source, but stated as fact. Kompas is a reliable source for news, but statements about history etc. should only be used with care or ideally replaced with peer-reviewed scholarly sources.

The academic paper T. Shamsul Bahrin in Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde is certainly a reliable source, but also should be used with care. It is an estimate based on extrapolation. The author himself mentions other estimates (like the one C.A. Vlieland who wrote in 1934 that "less than 60 per cent of the present Malay population is over 40 years standing in the peninsula"). Also, T. Shamsul Bahrin only talks about the percentage of people that could be counted as immigrants in their time, i.e. people born outside of Malaya, Sabah and Sarawak. It does not include assimilated descendants, which is the topic of this article. If you include people with full or partial ancestry from Indonesia (or the earlier Dutch East Indies), higher figures are quite probable. The only things is, we need better sources than Okezone and Kompas before we can turn it into infobox matter. Austronesier (talk) 11:49, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

Beg to differ, the academic paper by T. Shamsul Bahrin is not an estimation, it is purely based on Malayan census done by British from the 19th century and 20th century. Coincidently, these were the period when the immigrants from Indonesia came en masse due to strong Economic growth. However, lets not forget that there are Malay natives in Malay peninsula before these immigrants came. They were mostly concentrated in the North and Eastern States of the peninsula (Kelantanese, Kedahan, Terengganuans, Pahang, Perakian). The only known significant migration before Brtish era, was only two, the waves of Minangkabau migration to Negeri Sembilan, and Bugis migration to Selangor. Even if you want to consider these people as "Indonesians" that have assimilated, their numbers based on the Malay population of Negeri Sembilan and Selangor in the academic paper (if you assume all of them are descendants of those immigrants, which is highly unlikely) are still numerically inferior to those Malays of the Northern and Eastern States. Thus to say that 50%-80% Malaysian Malays as "Indonesian desdendants" is plain ridiculous.(Etugrulghazi (talk) 07:17, 10 June 2023 (UTC))

What is the conclusion of this discussion? i can see nobody interested to prove their points here, still want to go hiding behind their garbage sources instead of the actual Malayan census record. I will proceed this if no one interested to dispute the census source Bodoindon (talk) 08:07, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

The Malaysian census does not record people of Indonesian descent. It records people that were born outside of Malaysia (or predecessor states/colonies). Once they're naturalized, their offspring will be recorded as Malays, which is of course formally correct since they will generally use Malay as their first language and primarily identify as Malay, and secondarily by the heritage ethnicity. So there is no other way than to do estimates, as long there are no surveys that explicitly and systematically ask respondents about their "identity" or non-autochthonous "descent". Note that intermarriage will increase the number of people with partial non-autochthonous ancestry, who may or may not consider this ancestry as essential for self-identifying. In some cases, such ancestry can be considered prestigeous (e.g. Bugis descent, especially if claims of aristocratic descent come into play), so people will tend to emphasize it; in other cases, it doesn't matter and becomes irrelevant after a one or two generations. To sum up: since the article title is "Malaysians of Indonesian descent", there is no sharply measurable population figure associated with it.

That said, the edit-warring editor that insisted on using inadequate sources (like web news sites) for the quite unmeasurable population has been blocked (and has not resurged as a sock—yet). The other edit-warring party has disappeared into inactivity. I will simply remove the population figure until somebody brings up a reliable source that actually talks about the topic of this article and contains explicit and up-to-date figures. –Austronesier (talk) 12:31, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

The census was indeed recorded the Indonesians in Malaya/Malaysia. The so called naturalisation as you claimed is a more recent phenomenon, and did not occur significantly to Non-Malay populations prior to the formation of Malaysia. Nevertheless, its good that the incorrect information already been removed. Etugrulghazi (talk) 17:31, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

I think by "naturalisation" you mean cultural assimilation, which indeed was less marked in colonial times and the early statehood years. I meant naturalisation strictly in a legal sense. Obtaining status as resident of British Malaya or citizen of Malaysia has been possible for immigrants from Indonesia (or the Dutch East Indies) not only in recent times. –Austronesier (talk) 17:50, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Yes obtaining citizenship was possible, however doesnt necessarily they can became Malays as you mentioned. Colonial census enumerated different ethnicities of the archipelago separately from Malays until 1957, thus the data is still accurate Etugrulghazi (talk) 20:14, 26 July 2023 (UTC)