When you say "Melayu" to Jawanese....

In Javanese the word Melayu means running away, or a runaway, that is why if you go to Java and ask a Javanese if he is Melayu he will feel very insulted. The word Melayu found on the statue as claimed in your URL; http://www.sabrizain.org/malaya/malays4.htm thus denotes that this person was a Melayu, a “Runaway.”

These people the runaways whether in Sumatra or in the Malay Peninsula referred to themselves as orang Melayu, it is therefore no coincidence that the word orang is placed before Melayu, people who ran away so to speak.

In the Malay Peninsular it was gradually accepted as the word to describe the Javanese, the Bugis, the Menang, the Achinese etc. and even the Kelantanese who are actually Yunanese and have their origins in China, because they recognized the fact that at the end of the day they were all Melayu, or Run Aways from their respective homelands the word was accepted by all these communities to describe themselves.

In fact before the formation of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) it is a fact that all the people in the country had referred to themselves as Menang, Achinese, Bugis, Java etc. etc. and we all know that the Kelantanese used to treat the other Melayu, that is the Menang, Java the Bugis etc. as foreigners.

Well for that matter even Mahathir Mohammed was registered as Indian in King Edwards College where he studied medicine.

The Malay therefore very much like the Indians, and later the Chinese are Melayu in the very true sense of the word because they all left their respective countries to come to this location in South East Asia called Malaysia today.

The real natives of the country are the Orang Laut, the Jakun, the Kadazaan, the Iban, the Senoi and the rest, and not the so called Orang Melayu, because these people are actually Javanese, Achinese, Bugis, people from the Mollucas islands, and other parts of neighbouring Indonesia, including those from Cambodia and even China (Yunanese). That explains the word Melayu in various parts of Sumatra too.

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