This is what a representative told us on the phone: After all they are THE institution responsible for coordinating the use of Malay language and literature in the whole country here, so one would expect them to speak king’s BM right?ĬILISOS contacted the publisher Dewan Bahasa & Pustaka and spoke to their corporate communications department. Langsat.Īt the start of the article, we told y’all that we were curious why an institution with a high-up, long-standing reputation like Kamus Dewan would print words that are considered so vulgar. In that same article, we saw a comment that really win’s the Internet. In response, PKR’s Communications Director Fahmi Fadzil said it was very unbecoming of the PM to use such a word. Najib himself used this word, saying that without UMNO, Malays will be bangsat. Or like a person who kena halau away by the masyarakat. SOSCILI writers described it more like bastard as an English equivalent. But what does it mean? According to Kamus Dewan, it can mean a smelly bedbug (huh?!?), a rotten person, or a poor person. Malaysia has been hearing a lot of this word lately, especially in politics (read here, here, here and here). Example – bongok, bangang, babi, bahlul, bedebah, bebal, and the word which made this entry, ‘bangsat’. Well, arguably not all of the following B words can be considered swearing la coz some of them are just slightly mean rather than vulgar. One thing that stood out when it comes to Malay swear words is so many of them start with the letter B. Smelly kutu? HUHH? Screencap from Kamus Dewan online “I remember when I accidentally sat on mud and my teacher screamed ‘Pantat ko, kotor suda!’,” he said. Our writers who said that are Malacca and Pahang represent, while our writer from Johor said both equally rude. One of our readers from Sabah told us it means butt over there. One SOSCILI writer (from Shah Alam) felt that this word is much worse than ‘puki’, but other writers said it could be less insulting outside Selangor or KL. Maybe if you see it in that context it’s not so strange, because a**licking is quite a normal (albeit rude) term in English.Įxtra bit of trivia… Kamus Dewan also has a synonym for ‘pantat’ which is ‘burit’, used as a swear word too. Like ‘menjilat pantat’! If you took the words separately and literally, it’s like….eww wuuut?! But as the word ‘pantat’ itself is defined as butt, a-hole, or vagina in Kamus Dewan, the variation ‘menjilat pantat’ is used to refer to the action of sucking up to authority, in other words, a**licking. While the other swear words we found had a root word and a few variations of usage, ‘pantat’ has the most, erm, creative variations. This word has the most interesting variations of all our entries so far. Out of all the swear words we found in the dictionary, this was the only one Kamus Dewan labelled sangat kasar, so you realise that the folks at Dewan Bahasa & Pustaka (publisher of the Kamus Dewan) are probably of like mind with SOSCILI – that this word is really, really bad and shouldn’t be ever used in polite society. However, only the root word is published with a definition, which is kemaluan perempuan, while the others are defined as makian (swear word), carut (indecent) and perkataan yang sangat kasar. Interestingly, we found not only the main word ‘puki’ in the Kamus Dewan, but variations of its usage, ‘pukimak’ and ‘puki mai’. The word translates to vagina in English. It is quite universally known (and used) among most Malaysians, even by those who speak other languages. We start off with one of the worst swear words in the BM language (according to our BM team SOSCILI, this is prolly one of the worst in this list). The Kamus even has variations on the usage of this word!