Malayo - the Malay-Indonesian dialect of Sri Lanka - is still spoken as a mother-tongue by a few tens of thousands of Sri Lankan Muslim citizen spread mainly in the capital city (Slave Island in Colombo), and in provincial Sinhalese or Tamil areas (respectively Hambanthota and Sammanthurai). There were in Sri Lanka several waves of migration by groups of "Malays" (as they were finally labelled by the British when they took over the island) coming from Malaysia-Indonesia for the past two thousand years.

This long history of inter-relations left its mark on Sinhala Language (many decisive borrowings), on the island's toponymy, and on the Sri Lankan peoples' way of life. The outrigger water-craft, oru, is one such item cum word which became totally integrated - and which is shared as well even with Pacific islands' populations.

During the first millennium AD, Sri Lanka and the Maldives could not have remained estranged to the movements of populations from the archipelago towards Madagascar. Moreover some clues such as in Ptolemy's works suggest possible "Malay" settlements in the island.

The 13th century invasion by the "Java" Buddhist king Chandrabhanu (in fact coming from the isthmus of Kra) left important place names in the North of the island.

Anyhow, Malayo as a minority language of present-day Sri Lanka dates back from the last wave, when in the 18th century many Indonesian Muslims were deported by the Dutch to Sri Lanka: rebel princes from Java, Tidor, Madura, Moluccas, etc. but also convicts, and soldiers from many other islands (Amboinese, Bandanese, Balinese, Bugis, etc.).

Malayo remained a language confined to a micro-community. It is still the mother-tongue of multi-lingual speakers - who need to know also Tamil as the language of Islam in Sri Lanka, Sinhala as the majority language, and English as a language of prestige. Here, Malayo is unknown outside of the Malay families.

Having no more contacts with the archipelago for more than two centuries, Malayo developed its own specificities. First the original settlers, who were coming from various islands, had surely to converse between themselves in a Malay lingua franca of their own. It became a sort of specific creole when they intermarried local women, having Tamil or Sinhala as a mother-tongue. All these conditions made Malayo much receptive to the island's dominant languages: many lexical borrowings of course, but especially many decisive syntactic borrowings (order of the words in the sentence, case system, negation, interrogation, absolutive…). Thus Malayo became a more Sri Lankan or even Dravidian kind of language… Studies on corpus show how the original Malay forms are retained or substituted. And on another hand, a comparative study with the Sri Lankan Portuguese creole (also cut off from the country of origin for many centuries) displays similarities between these processes of transformation as well as the will of a much impoverished micro-minority to retain its linguistic identity markers.