The present invention provides a hmm (hidden markov model) based malay text to malay speech synthesis system comprising of a plurality of software modules in the form of computer readable instructions residing in memory of a computer and executed by a central processing unit (CPU) of said computer, the system comprising of a training module for the training of a plurality of hmm (hidden markov model) statistical predictive models residing in a statistical parameter model database to generate an acoustic speech model of malay speech and a synthesizing module for synthesizing malay speech from a malay text input string utilizing context dependent labels generated from the malay text input string and the acoustic model for malay speech; characterized in that, the speech synthesis module includes a context dependent label generation unit that automatically generates context dependent labels for malay language from malay language input text string derived in part from syllabification rules that are exclusive to malay language.