Musi

Musi (Palembang Malay, autonymously Baso Pelembang) is a Malay variety of the Austronesian family, spoken by around 3.1 million people in the South Sumatra region of Indonesia, primarily centered on Palembang city. Palembang was the historical capital of the Srivijaya Empire (7th-13th centuries CE), one of the earliest major Hindu-Buddhist Malay states of Southeast Asia, and the Musi language continues to be a major lingua franca of South Sumatra to the present day. Linguistically, Musi is part of the Malayic continuum but with distinctive South Sumatran phonological features (such as final-syllable -a → -o, e.g., apa → apo "what") and significant lexical differences from Standard Indonesian/Malay. The Palembang Sultanate (1659-1825) provided continued cultural support for Musi.