Modern Malay/Indonesian is very flexible in its range of terms of personal reference and address. Kinship terms, titles, epithets, and a variety of nouns adjectives (with or without the personal marker si) may all be used where other languages like English or Arabic would normally require pronouns. This is not to say that pronouns are not used; there is also a small, closed set of pronouns, whose function is purely deictic or anaphoric, and which have no independent semantic meaning, expressing various categories such as person, number, and status. Examples of pronouns in standard Malay/Indonesian are aku and saya (both first person singular), kamu and engkau (both second person, unmarked for number), dia (third person singular), mereka (third person plural), and beliau (third person singular honorific).

Standard Malay and Standard Indonesian have their roots in Classical Malay. This study examines some Classical Malay texts to see how closely its use of pronouns resembles its modern counterparts. The results show that Classical Malay was just as flexible in its choice of terms of reference and address as its modern offspring; that is, kinship terms, titles, epithets, and a variety of nouns adjectives were all used . Most modern pronouns were also already present in Classical Malay. However, a detailed examination reveals that in most cases, there was some important difference in their function. For example, the third person pronoun ia, which in standard Malay and standard Indonesian can only have a singular referent, was commonly used with a plural referent in Classical Malay. The form dia has a function identical to that of ia in modern Malay/Indonesian, though it is less formal. Dia was also used in Classical Malay, as the oblique counterpart of ia. Thus, while in modern Malay/Indonesian ia and dia are in a paradigmatic relationship, in Classical Malay they were in complementary distribution. Another example is beta (first person singular), which is limited to use by royalty in modern standard Malay and to poetic use in standard Indonesian. In Classical Malay, however, beta was relatively unmarked, and occurred in a wide range of contexts, similar to those of aku.

Data for this study are taken from published scientific editions of two 16th century texts, Aqa'id an-Nasafi and SulalataAs-Salatin. Aqa'id an-Nasafi is the oldest known Malay manuscript, dated to 1590. It consists of an Arabic religious text with interlinear translation into Malay. Sulalat as-Salatin (popularly known as Sejarah Melayu) is a compilation of folk histories of the major Malay dynasties of the 16th century. This work has served as the canon after which other Classical Malay oeuvres were modeled. The version chosen is the manuscript known as Raffles manuscript No. 18, which is generally considered to reflect the oldest text of this work.