Ida'an- Begak is a West- Austronesian language spoken in the Malaysian state of Sabah, Borneo. This paper is based on fieldwork and will concentrate on the Begak dialect, which is spoken by about 1 500 speakers on the east coast of Sabah.

Nearly all speakers of Begak are able to speak Malay to a certain extent. Speakers over 45 generally speak Begak much better than Malay, speakers between 25 and 45 speak both languages equally well and speakers under 25 usually speak a variaty of Begak that is heavily influenced by Malay. As more speakers of Begak are exposed to Malay, more and more loanwords, calques and constructions are being borrowed from Malay.

The first topic that will be addressed is the morphological integration of Malay verbs in Begak. Older loan words from Malay starting with /p/, /b/, /a/, /be/ or /g/ are often reanalysed as vowel initial stems plus prefixes p-, b-, a-, b@- respectively. In other words, the initial consonant is reanalysed as a prefix and the rest of the word as the stem. The new stem can subsequently take other prefixes as well. Note: @ is used as a symbol for schwa.

Malay:	Begak:
pakai	p-akay (other forms are: m@ng-akay, m-akay)
berus	b-@rus (other forms are: m@ng-@rus, ni-rus, b-i-rus)
hancur	a-(@)ncur (other forms are: m-@ncur, m@ng-@ncur)
bicara	b@-saro (other forms are: g@-saro, m@ng@-saro)
belanja	b@-lanja (other forms are m@ng@-lanja)

This process seems to occur in older loanwords that are very well integrated into the language only. Newly borrowed items do not seem to follow this pattern, but this process needs further research.

Another phenomenon is the borrowing of Malay function words, such as complementizers and auxiliaries. The following senctence illustrates the use of mesti:

(1)	Mesti nong m-aham
	must comp DEP- understand
	'You have to understand'

The auxiliary mesti selects a subordinate sentence introduced by the complementizer nong, followed by a Dependent Voice verb marked by the prefix m-. This is the construction that the Begak equivalent sembay 'must' also selects. The question to be answered is: do all sentences with Malay function words follow the syntax of Begak? Are there cases in which the Malay syntactic construction is borrowed together with the function word? How different is the speach of younger speakers from that of older speakers, whose Begak is less heavily influenced by Malay? An attempt will be made to answer these questions.