This paper aims to review thechallenges and current development in the Malay Natural Language Processing (NLP). The incongruence of the spoken and written Malay language presents a NLP challenge and is attributable to both (1) the cultural, state level dialects and (2) the mixed usage of English-Malay languages, being part of the South East Asia region's colonization legacy. There is also inadequate publicly available Malay NLP resources in the form of domain specific text corpus, open source Part of Speech (POS) and Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems. That said, significant progress is being made in Malay lexicon, information retrieval (stop words and NER), text normalization, machine translation, sentiment analysis and test summarization. These present potential commercial opportunity in reaching out to the 215 million native speakers in the region, not counting theglobal Malay diaspora community. The Malay NLP is also crucial in protecting national and cross border as digital counter-terrorism arsenal.