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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="static/styles.css">
<link rel="icon" href="favicon.png">
<title>Malay Rumi-Jawi Converter</title>
</head>
<body>
<div class="top">
<header>
<h1>Malay Rumi-Jawi Converter</h1>
</header>
<nav>
<a href="index.html">Home</a>
•
<a class="at" href="about.html">About Rumi and Jawi</a>
•
<a href="qa.html">Q & A</a>
•
<a href="details.html">Technical Details</a>
</nav>
</div>
<main>
<h2>About Jawi and Rumi</h2>
<p class="justify">
The Malay language has two writing systems in modern use: the
romanised script Rumi and the Arabic script Jawi. Presently, Rumi
is by far the more common of the two, but Jawi continues to be
used for various cultural, religious, and administrative purposes,
and in parts of Malaysia and in Brunei the script is co-official
with Rumi. Jawi was the dominant script for writing Malay from
around the 14<sup>th</sup> century until the 20<sup>th</sup>
century. Prior to that, Old Malay scripts, Kawi and Rencong, were
derived from Sanskrit. Letters in Jawi largely correspond to those
in Arabic, with modifications made; in particular, the addition of
extra letters to represent sounds absent in Arabic. The absence of
vowels sometimes results in ambiguity that is not present in Rumi.
For instance, ڤيلو is either <em>pilu</em> (sadness) or
<em>pilau</em> (a native boat), and the reader decides the
pronunciation depending on context. Similarly, there may be a
single Rumi spelling that has multiple Jawi spellings, such as
<em>merah</em> which can be written مره or ميره; the difference
here being that the second form uses ي ("ya") for the <em>e</em>
vowel in <em>merah</em>.
</p>
<figure>
<table class="chars"><tr>
<td><span>چ</span><span>/t͡ʃ/</span></td>
<td><span>ڠ</span><span>/ŋ/</span></td>
<td><span>ڤ</span><span>/p/</span></td>
<td><span>ݢ</span><span>/g/</span></td>
<td><span>ۏ</span><span>/v/</span></td>
<td><span>ڽ</span><span>/ɲ/</span></td>
</tr></table>
<figcaption>Letters present in Jawi but absent in Arabic with
pronunciation in IPA</figcaption>
</figure>
<p class="justify">
Jawi’s rise coincided with the arrival of Islam, which explains
why its use today is often in religious contexts. However, the
script is not inherently tied to Islam nor to the Arabic language,
just as how Rumi is not inherently tied to any European
traditions. After its adoption, Jawi became the dominant writing
system in maritime Southeast Asia; the script of choice for legal
documents, communications between kings, trade agreements,
treaties, tax records, religious tracts, non-fictional and
creative writings. One genre of texts that used this script was
Malay medical manuscripts, known variously as <em>Kitab Tib</em>,
<em>Kitab Obat-Obatan</em> and <em>Kitab Mujarrabat</em>.
Surviving manuscripts show that the script was used to write
prescriptions that draw from multiple religious traditions. Islam
was a primary influence in this medical system but words for
charms and mantras for healing also alluded to deities or spirits
from Hindu-Buddhist and indigenous-animist tradition. Jawi was
thus used to articulate texts for multiple functions and expressed
diverse religious ideas.
</p>
<figure>
<img src="static/jawi-sample.jpg" alt="Sample of Jawi writing">
<figcaption>Sample of Malay written in the Jawi script from the
medical text <em>Kitab Tib</em></figcaption>
</figure>
<p class="justify">
The romanisation of the Malay language was likely a consequence of
European imperialism in the region. Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian
explorer who accompanied Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in
circumventing the globe, was one of the first to generate a list
of Malay terms in Roman letters, providing their meanings in
Italian in the early 16<sup>th</sup> centuries. More Romanised
vocabulary lists emerged as the Portuguese and later, the Dutch
and the British, intensified their colonial projects in the
region. Unlike Jawi, which developed without an authoritative
centre directing spelling and orthography, in the early twentieth
century, British and Dutch colonial authorities standardised the
Romanised spellings (Rumi) through the Wilkinson spelling system
and the van Ophuijsen spelling system respectively. These systems
were adopted as standard for communication within these colonies,
pushing Jawi to the margins. The marginalisation of Jawi persisted
after decolonisation, aided by the Western educated leaders in
Malaysia and Indonesia for whom a Rumi system of writing was more
advantageous than Jawi, which would have privileged an Islamic
educated class.
</p>
<figure>
<a title="Orhanghazi, CC BY-SA 4.0
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via
Wikimedia Commons"
href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pemasyhuran_Kemerdekaan_Malaya_1957.jpeg"><img
width="512" alt="Pemasyhuran Kemerdekaan Malaya 1957"
src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c0/Pemasyhuran_Kemerdekaan_Malaya_1957.jpeg/512px-Pemasyhuran_Kemerdekaan_Malaya_1957.jpeg"></a>
<figcaption>Malayan Declaration of Independence written in Jawi,
image courtesy of Wikimedia</figcaption>
</figure>
<p class="justify">
Although Malaysia’s 1957 Declaration of the Independence was
written in Jawi, the writing system was not widely used in
government administration. The status of Rumi was further elevated
through the National Language Act in 1963 that formally instituted
Rumi as the national writing system for the Malay language. Jawi
retreated into religious schools and specialist language
newspapers. In Indonesia, similar developments took place; the
writing system virtually disappeared from official documents,
textbooks and creative writing in the public sphere by 1956. Calls
to re-establish the Jawi script as a national writing system or in
school textbooks emerged periodically in Malaysia – the
latest as recent as 2019 – where such pressure was usually
linked to a political agenda for Malayisation of the nation. To
date, however, the ability to read and write in Jawi is a skill
that at least two generations of citizens in both states are not
widely conversant with. This Jawi-Rumi converter reflects that
need for a tool that could make these writings systems legible to
all speakers of the Malay language and facilitate the reading of
historical sources.
</p>
<h4>References</h4>
<p class="justify">
Melebek Abdul Rashid and Moain Amat Juhari, Sejarah Bahasa Melayu,
(Kuala Lumpur: Utusan Publications and Distributors, 2006).
</p>
<p class="justify">
Alessandro Bausani, “The First Italian-Malay Vocabulary by Antonio
Pigafetta,” East and West, 11:4 (1960), pp. 229-248.
</p>
<p class="justify">
James T. Collins, Malay, World Language: A Short History, (Kuala
Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1998)
</p>
<p class="justify">
Kevin Fogg, “The standardisation of the Indonesian language and
its consequences for Islamic communities,” Journal of Southeast
Asian Studies, 46:1, (2015), pp. 86-110.
</p>
<p class="justify">
Andries Teeuw, “The history of the Malay language: A preliminary
survey,” Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde, 115:2,
(1959), pp. 138-159
</p>
</main>
</body>
</html>