This collection of essays on the worldviews of the people in Malaysia focuses on the three main ethnic groups - the Malays, Chinese and Indians - as well as the indigenous peoples of Sabah. Topics include the Islamic worldview of Man, society and nature, the traditional Malay socio-political outlook, the language and worldview of the Malay peasants, as well as Malaysian folk-tales and drama. The worldview of social belonging among the Chinese and Indians, and the traditional worldviews of the indigenous peoples of Sabah are also presented.

Semelai is a previously undescribed and endangered Aslian (Mon-Khmer) language of the Malay Peninsula. This book - the first in-depth description of an Aslian language - provides a comprehensive reference grammar of Semelai. Semelai intertwines two types of morphological system: a concatenative system of prefixes, suffixes and a circumfix - acquired through extended contact with Malay - and a nonconcatenative system of prefixes and infixes (including infix reduplication), inherited from Mon-Khmer. There are distinctive word classes - Nominals, Verbs and Expressives - the latter iconic utterances which simultaneously provide information about the predicate and its arguments. Semelai has many derivational processes which change word class or affect transitivity, and it combines both head-marking and dependent-marking profiles. It also has a rich phonemic system of 20 vowels and 32 consonants. Nicole Kruspe's discussion is complemented with a generous number of illustrative examples and texts, creating a reference work that will be welcomed by descriptivists and typologists alike.