Melayu Kokos or Cocos Malay is a variety of Malay spoken on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean as well as in diasporas of Western Australia and Sabah, Malaysia. This talk traces the evolution of Melayu Kokos focusing on its linguistic sources as well as the sociohistorical circumstances in which it originated. Melayu Kokos shows structural hybridity, i.e. traits of diverse linguistic origins which reflect its evolution as a contact variety. The fact that this may not be as clear to the eye as, say, in instances of creolization, I claim, lies in the typological convergence of the varieties involved in the history of the language. It is nonetheless possible to trace the sources of hybrid structures through a careful socio-historical and linguistic analysis. This has interesting implications for the classification of so-called 'pidgin-derived Malay varieties' (cf. Prentice and Adelaar 1996) as well as for creolization theory in general.