The presence of loan words in a language shows the long-standing interactions between that
particular language as a recepient and its donors. Over time, these loan words are absorbed into
the recipient language and they become a part of the linguistic identity of its speakers. Very often
the speakers no longer realize that these words originally came from another language. This essay
looks at seventeenth-century texts of Christian songs in Malay that were first introduced to the
East Indies by the VOC. By looking at the presence of several loan words, mostly coming from
Arabic, Sanskrit, and Dutch this essay seeks to explain how these loan words form the identity of
speakers of Malay, not just among Christians who sang these songs, but also the speakers of this
lingua franca who lived all over the East Indies archipelago
