Orang Seletar


Orang Seletar are one of the 18 Orang Asli ethnic groups in Malaysia. They are classified under the Proto-Malay people group, which forms the three major people group of the Orang Asli. The Orang Seletar are also considered as part of the Orang Laut, natives of the Straits of Johor; separating Singapore from Peninsula Malaysia.
Despite their proximity to developed countries, the Orang Seletar largely retain a traditional way of life. In Singapore, the Seletar people are considered to be part of the Malay community. In Malaysia, the government considers the Orang Seletar to be one of the 18 Orang Asli officially registered tribes. As Orang Asli, the Seletar people are protected by the Department of Orang Asli Development, which was previously known as the Department of Orang Asli Affairs until 2011. The purpose of JAKOA is to raise the standard of living of the indigenous population to meet the average indicators of the country.
Although the Orang Seletar were originally classed as part of the Orang Laut, the Malaysian government and JAKOA classifies Seletar people as one of the indigenous Proto-Malay tribes, one of the three Orang Asli subgroups today. They are one of the few indigenous peoples of Peninsular Malaysia, whose lifestyle is connected with the sea, not with the tropical forest.
The Seletar people refer to themselves as Kon Seletar with the prefix "Kon-" or simply Kon; which is believed to have Mon-Khmer language origins. For comparison, in the Old Mon language and Middle Mon language, Kon means "a person belonging to a certain ethnic or social group".
The Seletar people speak their own Orang Seletar language which is closely related to Malay.

Settlement area

For a long time, the Seletar people have been practicing a nomadic way of life within the mangrove forests and marshes along the Tebrau Reach, as well as at the mouths of rivers that flows into it. They lived on both sides of the strait, freely moving from one shore to the other, despite the existence of a border between Singapore and Malaysia. The width of the Straits of Johor in any place does not exceed 2 km, and in some places does not exceed 500 meters. Such a narrow strip of water has never been a hindrance to sea nomads.
At the end of the 19th century, mangrove forests dominated most of the coastal areas and in the estuaries of the rivers in northern Singapore, at the time of the arrival of the British colonial here, they accounted for about 13% of the island. It was here that most of the Seletar people lived. Mangrove is a unique repository of rich and diverse aquatic plant and natural resources, the operation of which has built a traditional economic complex of this people. During the 20th century, mangrove forests in Singapore were cleared, and the Seletar people were forced to leave the region.
Now they live only on the Malaysian side. They have largely abandoned the nomadic way of life and started living in a more organized settlement areas located on the south coast of Johor where there are 9 villages namely, Kampung Teluk Kabung, Kampung Simpang Arang, Kampung Sungai Temun, Kampung Bakar Batu, Kampung Pasir Salam, Kampung Pasir Putih, Kampung Kuala Masai, Kampung Teluk Jawa and Kampung Kong Kong. Some of these villages are farther from the coast.
On the north coast of Singapore in the 1980s there were 3 villages, but now they are no longer found. Some of the Seletars currently living on the south coast of Johor can see a historical relationship with Singapore, while others have integrated into the Malay community in Singapore.

Population

The dynamics of the population in Malaysia is as follows:-
Year196019651969197419771980199319962000200320042010
Population2522902773745144978018011,0371,4071,4071,042

Data from the 1996 census of the JHEOA recorded 801 Seletar people, of which 796 were in the state of Johor, and another five were in Selangor.
Some sources, such as Ethnologue or Joshua Project, still report data on the presence of Seletar people in Singapore, but this is may not be accurate. According to Ariffin, in his general assessment of the population, speaks of 6 or 7 families of Seletar people remaining in Singapore, which is about 32-38 people; in Johor, he counted 514 Seletar people as of 1977. Today in Singapore, there are almost no more Seletar people remaining at all.

Language

They speak in the Orang Seletar language, which belongs to the Malay group of Austronesian languages. The Ethnologue project assigns it to the Malay.
French researcher Christian Pelras in 1972, conducted an analysis of the language at that time with the available Orang Seletar language dictionary. He came to the conclusion that it was only a dialect of the Malay language, since 85% of the Seletar words were Malay, and another 5% of the words are also present in Malay but have a slightly different meaning. 10% of the remaining words have no analogues in the Malay language. Some of this latter group seems to have matches in the languages commonly used on the island of Kalimantan. However, there are also words of which Pelras could not find analogues in other Austronesian languages. Among the 15% of the non-Malay words in the Orang Seletar language there are almost no words common in the neighboring Duano' language.
Fresh data from field research that was published in 2015 by Kevin Blissett and Dirk Elling. As a result of a survey on the Orang Seletar language media was a list of general vocabulary drawn up corresponding to the generally accepted conventional Swadesh list. Answers of respondents were recorded on a digital voice recorder, and then decoded with the International Phonetic Alphabet. It provides valuable information on how to actually say spoken words. However, this is only the beginning of the research. This language still requires a huge amount of additional study and records before it is stored to a large extent.
Like the findings of Pelras, these data capture the close lexical affinity of the Orang Seletar language with the Malay language. Many words are exactly the same as their correspondences in the Malay language; others can be derived from Malay words by simple phonological changes. A small group of words seems to be unique to the Orang Seletar language, without apparent connection with the Malay language. Such characteristics indicates it as a Malay dialect, but not as an entirely independent language.
However, there are also strong counter arguments. Firstly, the Orang Seletar language is not understandable to the Malay people. Secondly, both the Malay and the Seletar people considers the Malay language and Orang Seletar language as separate languages. In addition, it appears to have a significant grammatical differences between these two languages.
There is an alarming situation with the state of the Orang Seletar language. So far, representatives of senior and middle aged generations communicate with each other exclusively or mainly in their native language, but younger generations and people living outside the community are more likely to use Malay language. This is a situation where, with each generation, the caretakers of the Orang Seletar language become increasingly few, and what is even more disturbing is that few Seletar people teach their mother tongue to their own children. Thus, there is a tendency towards the gradual displacement of the Orang Seletar language, similar to the languages of other indigenous Orang Asli peoples of Peninsular Malaysia, by standard Malay language. It is no surprise that UNESCO includes the Orang Seletar language in the list of languages that are at serious risk of disappearance.
There is no writing system in the Orang Seletar language.

Religion

Although the Seletar people are very close to the Malay language, they have remained animists up to the 1980s.
The missionary activities of the Malaysian authorities from the Department of Islamic Development Malaysia were not active in those days, and the Seletar people themselves do not really perceive the basic principles of Islam. The postulates of religion offered by the Malay people looked too abstract for them. For these sea nomads, these are just texts that are separated from real life. The Muslim religion does not have meaning and practical functions for them. The concept of the only God is too inaccessible, and, unlike the spirits of nature, can not affect specific events.
As before, the Seletar people worship the numerous spirits that they believe are inhabited everywhere: they live on trees, under water, in rocks, in caves, in the air and so forth. At the conviction of the Seletar people, when not respecting the environment; that is the abode of spirits, mishaps like illnesses, conflicts and death will occur. The only way to treat them is through exorcism and appeasement of the spirits. Deaths and illnesses of the Seletar people are connected with the land. They would go to the shore to cure a patient or to bury the dead.
The situation has changed in the 1980s, when the Malaysian government began to work to strengthen the country's position on Islam. Muslim missionaries engaged in the conversion of Islam to the pagan indigenous Orang Asli peoples of the country. In 1997, according to JHEOA statistics, there were already 240 Muslim on the territory of the state of Johor. That is about a quarter of the Seletar people's population. According to Joshua Project, 5% of the Seletar people are Christians.
Due to the fact that the majority of the Seletar people are not Muslims and still practice animism, they are not perceived by society as Malay.

History