KOTA KINABALU, Jan. 26 -- In Sabah, this casual three-word greeting "kau sudah makan?" can be arranged around any way and still mean the same thing: "Have you eaten?"

Linguist Jane Wong said that in standard Bahasa Malaysia, there is only one grammatically correct way to order the sentence.

"But in Sabah, you could mix it up any which way. 'Kau makan sudah?', 'Sudah kau makan?', 'Makan sudah kau?' It wouldn't be wrong or unusual. It is still sort of Bahasa Malaysia or Malay, but with a far more casual structure," she told Malay Mail in a recent interview.

Wong, a lecturer with University Malaysia Sabah (UMS) and senior fellow with the Borneo Institute for Indigenous Studies, pointed out that the version spoken in Sabah has evolved so u...