I have always been wondering, where on earth did we get the name ‘Sabah’ for our state? All the time spent living in Sabah, I have never heard of any stories or even meaning of the word ‘Sabah’ from any of the indigenous tribes in Sabah. So I did some so called ‘research’ while sitting and drinking some water.

One thing’s for sure, the word ‘Sabah’ is also used in the Arab world. It’s actually an Egyptian word meaning ‘morning’. It’s also a popular name to be given to babies as it will represent the meaning ‘born in the morning’. I also came across a website called sabah.com before. The last I checked it still looks like it’s owned by some middle east company. But checking the whois query shows that it was registered in Malaysia.

By the way, if you use Google Trends to search the term Sabah, you will notice that it’s more of a popular search in Turkey compared to Malaysia. But to my surprise, when you check by cities, folks from Kuantan, Malaysia had the highest query. Kuantan? What’s with their interest with Sabah? Hmm…

There was another suggestion on the origin of the name ‘Sabah’. The name has been used long before the arrivals of the nice ol’ chaps from Britain. It was mentioned that the Brits did not like the idea of calling this place ‘Sabah’. So they renamed it as ‘North Borneo’. However, ‘Sabah’ was used again when it joined Malaysia in 1963. Sabah was also known as ‘Seludang’. It was mentioned in a Java poetry Nagarakertagama written by Prapancha in 1365. Learn more about Nagarakertagama by going to this wikipedia link

Another source of this name was said taken from guess what? Banana. It came from this plant called ‘pisang saba’. Now it’s known as ‘pisang menurun’. This type of banana was commonly grown in the west coast of Sabah. With influence of dialects and stuff, the word ’saba’ was in the end pronounced as ‘Sabah’.

So, since there was no real hard evidence for the origin of the name ‘Sabah’, I have to conclude that we have yet to find out the reason. Perhaps some other folks out there do have some other source. If only we have some folks who committed their time and effort to do some real study on this topic, travel the world and visit some places, I guess we are pretty much stuck for now.

Who knows perhaps some Arab sailors in the past would have traveled to Borneo first then everyone else and when they reached the shorelines of North Borneo, early in the morning the skipper shouted “Sabah”! to wake his fellow ship mates?..and so the name stays.

The banana and the Nagarakertagama part was sourced from sejarahmalaysia.pnm.my. The banana photo is from worldwideplants.com

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