Sabah’s name might have come from the Bruneian word for ‘north’

Aramaiti anyone?

Nicknamed Negeri Di Bawah Bayu (Land Beneath the Wind), Sabah (formerly known as North Borneo) not only has some of the chillest people in Malaysia, it’s also home to many marvels of nature, especially if you’re into scuba diving and sea life. It’s also home to the one of the highest peaks in Southeast Asia, Mount Kinabalu.

And perhaps owing to the state’s rich history and diverse cultures, it’s not very clear how it got its name. Though the first written use of Sabah’s name as it is written today was found in a book titled ‘The New Ceylon, Being a Sketch of British North Borneo, or Sabah‘ (1881) by Joseph Hatton, the name probably has a much earlier origin. Or origins, as we’ll find out.

‘Sabah’ might have come from Bruneian Malay with three separate meanings

Allen R. Maxwell, an anthropologist whose work centered on the peoples of Borneo, was convinced that the Bruneian Malay or Kedayan word ‘saba’ translated to ‘upstream’, or ‘north’, referring to the northern part of Borneo. It made sense to him after he considered local settlements of the time and that might’ve been how the Bruneian Malays and Kedayans would’ve referred to the area.

R.M. Jasni, a local writer, however argued that Saba or Sabah is of the Bruneian Malay deriving from the term ‘seberang’, meaning across. He also suggested another possibility – the Bruneian Malay word ‘sabak’ which roughly translates as ‘the act or place of boiling down sugar palm juice or sap‘. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any reasons for Jasni’s theories, which makes Maxwell’s hypothesis more logical, though inconclusive.

It might have also originated from Dusun, Arabic, Tagalog and/or Visayan languages

The rest of these theories either have very short explanations or none at all, so we’ll have a quick fire round here:

• Dusun – ‘Sabah’, referring to the most northerly part of Borneo
• Arabic – ‘Sab’at or Sab’a’, referring to the number seven
• Tagalog and Visayan (Filipino languages) – ‘Saba’, referring to a type of banana
• Tagalog – ‘Saba’, derived from the Sanskrit ‘Sabha’, meaning ‘congregation/crowd’

As it stands, we don’t know for sure where the name ‘Sabah’ comes from, despite the painstaking effort taken by some researchers (such as Danny Wong Tze Ken of Universiti Malaya, who provided the bulk of the research included here) to try and make sense of what little there is on the subject. Unfortunately, there isn’t much-written evidence that can solidly point to any one origin story as being the ‘correct’ one.

If you want to discover more interesting origins of our states’ names, pick one from the list below!

Kedah | Terengganu | Kelantan | Perlis | Johor

Selangor | Penang | Perak | Pahang | Malacca

Negeri Sembilan | Sabah | Sarawak | Federal Territories