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The Malays of Sri Lanka (also known in Sinhalese language as Ja Minissu, Javanese) originated in Southeast Asia and today consist of about 50,000 people. Their early ancestors came to the country when both Sri Lanka and Indonesia were colonies of the Dutch, while the second wave (1796 � 1948) came from the Malay Peninsular, when both Malaya and Sri Lanka were in the British Empire.
Most of the early immigrants were soldiers, posted by the Dutch which later continued by the British for colonial administration to Sri Lanka, who decided to settle on the island. Other immigrants were convicts or members of noble houses from Dutch East Indies (present day Indonesia) who were exiled to Sri Lanka and who never left. The main source of a continuing Malay identity is their common Malay language, which includes numerous words absorbed from the Moorish variant of the Tamil language and has changed its grammatical structures along the model provided by Sinhala and Tamil. In the 1980s, the Malays made up about 5% of the island's Muslim population, making them one of the smallest minority groups in Sri Lanka.
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