Malay orthography


The modern Malay alphabet or Indonesian alphabet, consists of the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet without any diacritics. It is the more common of the two alphabets used today to write the Malay language, the other being Jawi. The Latin Malay alphabet is the official Malay script in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, while it is co-official with Jawi in Brunei.
Historically, various scripts such as Pallava, Kawi and Rencong were used to write Old Malay, until they were replaced by Jawi with the introduction of Islam. The arrival of European colonial powers brought the Latin alphabet to the Malay Archipelago.
As the Malay-speaking countries were divided between two colonial administrations, two major different spelling orthographies were developed in the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya respectively, influenced by the orthographies of their respective colonial tongues. The Soewandi Spelling System, used in the Dutch East Indies and later in independent Indonesia until 1972, was based on the Dutch alphabet. In 1972, as part of the effort of harmonizing spelling differences between the two countries, Indonesia and Malaysia each adopted a spelling reform plan, called the Perfected Spelling System in Indonesia and the New Rumi Spelling in Malaysia. Although the representations of speech sounds are now largely identical in the Indonesian and Malaysian varieties, a number of minor spelling differences remain.

Letter names and pronunciations

, Enhanced Indonesian Spelling System.
Number1234568891011121314151617181920212223242526
Upper caseABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Lower caseabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
IPA phoneme~

The names of letters differ between Indonesia and rest of the Malay-speaking countries. Indonesia largely follows the letter names of the Dutch alphabet, while Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore follow the English alphabet. Regardless of the letter names, however, the letters represent the same sounds in all Malay-speaking countries. The Malay alphabet has a phonemic orthography; words are spelled the way they are pronounced, with few exceptions. The letters Q, V and X are rarely encountered, being chiefly used for writing loanwords.
* Many vowels are pronounced differently in Peninsular Malaysia and Sumatra : tujuh is pronounced tujoh, rambut as rambot, kain as kaen, pilih as pileh, etc., and are also allophones of /i/ and /u/ in closed final syllables in peninsular Malaysian and Sumatran. Many vowels were pronounced and formerly spelt differently that way also in East Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia.
In addition, there are digraphs that are not considered separate letters of the alphabet:

Pre-1972 spelling system

Pre-1972 British Malaya and Borneo/Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore orthography

Pre-1972 Dutch East Indies/Indonesia orthography

Comparison table