The name Malaysia was adopted in 1963 when the Federation of Malaya, Singapore, North Borneo and Sarawak formed a 14-state federation. However the name itself had been vaguely used to refer to areas in Southeast Asia prior to that. A map published in 1914 in Chicago has the word Malaysia printed on it referring to certain territories within the Malay Archipelago.Politicians in the Philippines once contemplated naming their state "Malaysia", but in 1963 Malaysia adopted the name first. At the time of the 1963 federation, other names were considered: among them was Langkasuka, after the historic kingdom located at the upper section of the Malay Peninsula in the first millennium of the common era.
In 1850 the English ethnologist George Samuel Windsor Earl, writing in the Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia, proposed naming the islands of Indonesia as Melayunesia or Indunesia. He favoured the former �for the colonial reference.
Following his 1826 expedition in Oceania, the French Navigator Jules Dumont d'Urville invented the terms Malaisia, Micronesia and Melanesia, distinguishing these Pacific cultures and island groups from Polynesia. In 1831, he proposed these terms to The Soci�t� de G�ographie (Paris, France), the world's oldest geographical society. For the name Malaisia, Dumont d'Urville had in mind a region including present day Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. At that time, it was thought that the inhabitants of this region could be designated by the encompassing term "Malay".
In a strict sense, however, the Malays are the people who speak the Malay language and live on the east coast of Sumatra, the Riau Islands, the Malay Peninsula and the coastline of the island of Borneo.
The Treaty of 1824 between the English and the Dutch resulted in a division of the Malay world. The term "Malaysian" is used to refer to Malaysia as a state, while the word "Malay" refers to the language, culture, and ethnicity, and thus covers a larger area. The term "Malay world", therefore, refers to the geographical area inhabited by the Malays.
The word Melayu itself is said to be the origin of the Melayu Kingdom, a classical kingdom that existed between the 7th and the 13th century and was established around present-day Dharmasraya on Sumatera. It was founded by the society around the Batanghari river and the gold traders from the Minangkabau hinterland. The continental part of the country bore the name Malaya (without the "-si-") until 1963, when it federated with the territories of Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore on the northern part of the island of Borneo.