Indonesia and the Malay World, Vol. 30, No.

86, 2002

JAWI SPELLING AND ORTHOGRAPHY: A BRIEF

REVIEW

E. ULRICH KRATZ
The history of the spelling of Malay and other Indonesian languages is long and
fascinating. Understandably, it is tied in closely with the history of the scripts used for
the writing of Malay over the centuries and, given the differing nature of the scripts in
use at one time or another, they have had different impacts on Malay spelling. From
using forms of the Pallava and Nagari scripts, Malay moved on to Jawi, a modi ed form
of the Arabic alphabet, and then to Rumi, the Roman or Latin script. Today, the Latin
script is used predominantly throughout the Malay world, notwithstanding the powerful
association of Jawi with Islam and hence with Malay identity.
Studies of individual examples of writing aside, our general knowledge of the
development of these scripts in the Malay world prior to the introduction of printing
remains uneven, since their presence tends to be taken for granted. Scripts are prone to
be looked at as awed images of their foreign ancestors, and they have rarely been
studied in their own right, but merely as ancillaries to other studies or for other purposes.
Spelling systems are equally judged with a view to consistency and conformity, to
spelling law and order.
Well-known and probably still indispensable is the extensive tabling work by Holle
(1882) which retraces the then known evidence of inscriptions, manuscripts, and other
objects with writing in Indonesian languages on them. Then there is the very important
study by de Casparis (1975), who, for the rst time, gives us a deeper historical
understanding of the development of Pallava and Nagari scripts in the context of Island
South East Asia. More recently, the study by Kozok (1999) offers an important and
detailed look at the development of the Batak script as a major example of the Pallava
transformation. Comparable studies for other Indonesian forms of the Pallava script are
still lacking.
Rumi writing and spelling were most recently discussed by Vikr (1988) in exhaustive
detail. He provides a succinct survey of their development and the many diverging and
prescriptive attempts at standardizing the spelling, rst within the spheres of in uence of
the Dutch and the British, and then in the post-colonial Malay world. Post-colonial
efforts have eventually led to (almost) one system of spelling of Malay and Indonesian
words in the Latin script; the jointly-agreed common system is known, rather confusingly, by different namesas ejaan yang disempurnakan (or perfected spelling) in
Indonesia, and as ejaan baku (or standard spelling) in Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam and
Singapore.
Of the three writing systems, Indian, Middle Eastern, and Roman, Jawi remains the
least studied and documented in its own right with regard to actual writing and spelling.
Even its very name, Jawi, has long remained open to speculation (Roolvink, 1975).
Leaving aside earlier Arabic inscriptions on tombstones, the use of Jawi for Malay has
been in evidence since the days of the Trengganu Stone inscription. This, according to
Muhammad Naguib al-Attas (1970), dates from the early fourteenth century and provides
ISSN 1363-9811 print/ISSN 1469-838 2 online/02/860021-06 2002 Editors, Indonesi a and the Malay World
DOI: 10.1080/1363981022013464 7

22

E. Ulrich Kratz

evidence of the nalisation of the Jawi alphabet (Omar bin Awang, 1985). Then there
is the physical evidence of manuscripts from the sixteenth century onwards (Shellabear,
1898). We should remind ourselves however of the words of de Casparis (1975:72), that
behind the visible evidence of objects preserved, there is the invisible preceding and
contemporaneous history of a much larger writing tradition which has been lost, since
it had been recorded on perishable materials.
A reason for the lack of a deeper academic interest in Jawi writing and spelling itself
may have been the view that, irrespective of the local additions, Jawi was merely a
borrowing from Arabic (Shellabear, 1901). Furthermore, its Malay users appeared to
remain rather inept and inexperienced in its use. After all, there was no calligraphy to
boast about as in, say, Mughal India, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, or the Arabic
heartlands, all places with which the Malay world had been in sustained contact over
centuries. In addition, there was no proper system of spelling rules and norms, it
seemed, and instead, Malay scribes were said to write down randomly and to the best
of their ignorance what they had heard. By and large, any deviation and variation from
a postulated standard of spelling was seen as the result of scribal error and incompetence,
and great efforts were made to force Jawi spelling into a Procrustean bed of presumed
rules and standards. These rules and standards, however, originated more in the
perceived needs of European missionaries and colonial administrators who, ironically,
wrote in languages whose own rules of spelling were far from consistent.
But does this request for norms and standards really do justice to the evidence of the
Malay manuscript tradition, and was there really no system underlying the perceived
confusion?
What strikes the student of the Jawi writing tradition at a glance is the almost total
lack of historicity in the treatment of the Jawi spelling. Various discussions notwithstanding (Shellabear, 1901; Kang, 1986; Harahap, 1992; Hashim bin Musa, 1994; Amat
Juhari Moain, 1996), and not unlike the case of traditional Malay language and literature
themselves, Jawi spelling has been treated mostly in an unhistorical way. To put it most
negatively, this appears due to the perception that there have been only few and
insigni cant changes,an exempli cation of the fact that the Oriental is slow to
change, as Shellabear (1901:76) states.
Hand in hand with the view which sees Jawi spelling as we know it as xed and
nalized yet ineptly written by scribes, goes the normative attitude to Jawi spelling,
which treats its manifestations as spelt either correctly or incorrectly. Correct and
incorrect, that is, according to the normative and prescriptive criteria of European judges,
who not only endeavoured to standardize the spelling of Malay in Rumi, but also with
it that of Jawi; and correct or incorrect according to those who regretted that Jawi was
not really used as one would use the Arabic script and that Malay was not really spelt
as one would spell the Arabic language.
Lest one should think that the obsession with rules and norms was merely a
preoccupation of Islamic teachers and Christian missionaries and colonial administrators
cum scholars, let it be recalled that in Malaysia today, long after missionaries and
colonial administrators have gone, there are at least three different prescriptive spelling
systems of Jawi which compete with each other for exclusive recognition. Each with its
own political agenda, they are that of the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka which is a version
of the Zaba spelling, that of the Utusan newspaper, and that of the Pusat Dakwah. To
this might be added the system proposed and (only) used by Kang (1986).
Jawi, as used in the Malay world, is the modi ed Arabic script developed from its
Persian form. Perceptively, early Malay-speaking linguists had developed the Perso-

Jawi spelling and orthography: a brief review

23

Arabic script further to accommodate speci c Malay phonemes. This they did brilliantly,
even if Persian linguists had shown them the way when they had adapted the Arabic
script to their own needs. It seems highly unlikely that Jawi was introduced and used
exclusively by Arabs initially, and that only when it was used by non-native writers of
Arabic did its spelling become confused (Shellabear, 1901). One can assume that those
developing the Jawi script for use with Malay had been familiar with the Pallava script
and some of its South-East Asian variants as is, for example, illustrated by Ricklefs
(1976) and mentioned by Collins (1997:53).
Once established, Jawi bridged the various Malay dialects and usages in the palaces,
the markets, and the religious schools much better than Rumi would ever do. Rumi took
away the freedom of the speakers to pronounce and speak Malay in the way which they
were used to locally, and it broke the shared written link. With its insistence on spelling
conventions which were in uenced by Dutch or English, Rumi helped to divide the
Malay-speaking community, whereas the major perceived shortcoming of Jawi as written
in the Malay world, namely that of not presenting all vowels, was, I suggest, in fact its
major strength. If one knew Malay, one did not need the vowel signs, which tended only
to be used when there was a possibility of ambiguity and misunderstanding for the reader
in the mind of the scribe.
Only one study to date deals with the history of Jawi spelling as a process of
development and not one of deterioration and deviation. The study by Kang (1986)
suggests that Malay spelling has developed in three stages: period A between 1300 and
1600 which sees the disappearance of Arab words and other elements of the Arabic
language and writing; period B between 1600 and 1900 which witnesses the emergence
and presentation of at least one vowel in each word; and period C from 1900 onwards
which sees the continued advance of all vowels other than alif, with the exception of
some fossilized words which retain their Arabic spelling (Kang 1986:98). This may be
so, but it remains doubtful that Kangs criteria really go to the heart of the problem as,
it would seem, his references are less to the evidence of the Malay manuscripts
themselves than to European descriptions and characterizations of their nature and
speci cs. We have known for some years, however, that editions of Malay texts prepared
in reference to the European tradition of classical philology tell us more about their
editors perception of Malay than about the manuscripts themselves (Kratz 1981). By
referring exclusively to Arabic, as Shellabear does, Kang also seems to ignore the
importance of Persian with which Malay shares many of its Arabic borrowings.
Quite different from Kangs proposal, which attempts to place and date expressions of
the Jawi script historically in three stages, is the recent approach by Tol (2001), which
looks at writing styles and shapes of letters. Tol suggests using de nitive criteria for
describing actual examples of Jawi writing, in accordance with established practice
elsewhere, where the Arabic script in its various manifestations has been studied
carefully and systematically. Tol exempli es his suggestions by looking at the writing
style of a particular writer.
This is an important suggestion which will contribute signi cantly to a better
chronology of Jawi writing and, in turn, of spelling features. Yet it does not help to, nor
is it meant to, address the notion of the inability of Malay scribes to spell Malay
properly and according to some presumed rules, the perceived lack of a binding
orthographic system, nor the fateful habit of many an editor of correcting and perfecting
variations in Jawi spelling in accordance with some preconceived notions of correct and
incorrect spelling. There is no argument that Jawi texts contain scribal errors, but one
needs to distinguish obvious mistakes from any possible variations in spelling. One can,

24

E. Ulrich Kratz

in the Malay writing tradition, discern very strong conventions of how and how not to
write. This is acknowledged by many. One can also see a considerable effort to get it
right when one looks, for example, at the great effort at accuracy in the reproduction
of European names by scribes of Malay (an accuracy which is not matched by editors
who mutilate these names again in their transcriptions). The evidence shows that there
did not exist one single normative system for spelling Jawi (just as there are no
written-out Malay poetics in the prescriptive sense) but, it must be stressed, most words
are only ever spelled in one way. Changes in spelling, i. e. the differing spelling of any
given word, usually follows a recognizable pattern. It is the varying spelling of these
words, that fall outside the general consensus of how words are to be spelt, which gave
rise to the condescending attitude towards the Malay scribal tradition at large.
Wilkinson, who was probably the most sympathetic scholar to comment on the
spelling and writing of Jawi, wrote:
The vast majority of writers, however, trouble themselves very little
about theories of spelling. They spell as they have been taught to spell
without considering what is consistent and what is not. The student of
Malay will consequently do well as to waste no time over the study of
orthography. The more widely he reads, the clearer will his perception
be of the futility of either expecting uniformity or of enforcing it.
(Wilkinson, 1903:712).
Sound as Wilkinsons advice remains to this day, the question stands as to why there is
no uniformity and why there is variation and inconsistency in the spelling of Malay. I
suggest that any answer to this question will help our understanding of the dynamics of
cultural exchange in the Malay world at a level not touched by many of the generalizations encountered to date.
To nd a possible explanation, one has to go back to de Casparis suggestion that
there has been a continuous history of writing which is not revealed by the sources (de
Casparis, 1975:73). One has to remember that Jawi did not come out of nothing and that
prior to its introduction people were already familiar with the Pallava and Nagari scripts
which, unlike the Arabic script but similar to the Latin one, spelt out each phoneme,
consonant and vowel. The Pallava script accommodated the basic structure of the
Austronesian word of consonantvowelconsonantvowel(consonant) and its pronunciation extremely well, and it stands to reason that Malay scribes adapting to the new
writing system of Jawi would have wanted to continue to express the speci c character
of Malay and speci c Malay phonemes in the new Arabic-derived script. This they did,
rstly by adding more letters to the alphabet, and secondly, by adhering to a way of
spelling which was closer to the one they and their readers were used to from writing
and reading forms of the Pallava script. Naturally, there was opposition from those who
wanted to adopt and apply the new system in its totality in order to express their new
faith down to the letter. It is in this that the lack of uniformity has its roots, and where
one can observe the struggle between old and new, between Pallava principles and the
Arab way of things, expressed in the spelling of Malay words, either indigenous, or
borrowed from Sanskrit, or more recently introduced from Arabic and Persian.
Quite often there is a pragmatic and practical compromise, dubbed inconsistency by
European critics and ideological purists alike. Ultimately, however, the conclusion has
to be drawn that the way traditional Malay has been spelt is less an indicator of a lack
of application of Malay scribes to the new culture and religion, but more an indicator of

Jawi spelling and orthography: a brief review

25

the strength and the deep roots of the previous writing tradition within Malay culture in
general. Malay spelling as we know it from the manuscript tradition then re ects the
con ict between an older Indian and a more recent Islamic tradition.
The arrival of the Latin script cannot have helped the process of agreeing on a single
form of spelling, since it threw up again the questions raised when Jawi was rst
introduced and may have made scribes want to experiment, as did Zaba or Major Dato
Haji Mohd. Said Sulaiman, or the journal Dian (Amat Johari Moain, 1996: 70101).
This con ict, I suggest, still remains unresolved to this day, if the present Malaysian
disagreement about the right way to spell Jawi is placed into its historical context.
Today, it is no longer the Pallava system which competes with a pure Arabic, i.e. the
perceived Islamic, way of spelling, but it is the continuing interference of Rumi which
keeps the con ict going. What is ignored however in this struggle of the ideologues and
purists is the successful compromise, which had been achieved over centuries, and which
aimed to give the Malay language and its actual usage its own. Yet this was a
compromise which had served communication among all Malays, whatever their dialect
and whatever their learning, so well in the past and which had gained them the respect
of the Europeans who made contact with them (Collins, 1997:52).
There are important ideas and thoughts in many of the studies of Jawi spelling and
writing. The time has come however to look at the history and nature of Jawi spelling
and writing with a fresh eye and to rid oneself from the assumptions and presumptions
of past scholarship, lest the negative and dismissive perception of the Malay spelling
tradition is found out to be, yet again, the result of the pars pro toto approach to all
things Malay, which students of Malay are not unfamiliar with.
SOAS
Thornhaugh Street
Russell Square
London WC1H 0XG
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