Jawi, an endangered orthography in the Malaysian linguistic landscape

ABSTRACT

Jawi is the orthography in which Malay has been written since the Middle Ages, when it was adapted from the Arabic script. Introduced by Muslim traders, it was adapted to Malay phonology using diacritics that modified six letters. It was used until the Roman script (Rumi) brought in by European traders and colonisers began to supplant it in the nineteenth century. In spite of that, Jawi still appears in the linguistic landscape of Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and Pattani (Thailand). For this article snapshots have been taken of different shop signs using Jawi in Kuala Lumpur, Malacca and Kota Bharu (Malaysia). After an introduction to the structure and use of Jawi and the multilingual and ‘multiscriptal’ linguistic landscape in Malaysia, the significance of Jawi in the Malay Archipelago and its mainly symbolic use in the linguistic landscape are discussed. To complement the analysis, a quantitative survey carried out among a sample of Malaysian undergraduate students and a qualitative one among a small sample of teachers and lecturers in one Malaysian university on their attitudes towards the use of Jawi are also discussed. The article closes with some considerations and suggestions for the possible revival of Jawi.

KEYWORDS:

• Arabic script
• Jawi
• linguistic landscape
• Malay

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term ‘bumiputra’ refers to the ethnic groups considered to be the original inhabitants of Malaysia. These include the various Dayak tribal groups of Borneo and the aboriginals of the peninsula, known as Orang Asli, plus other smaller groups.

2 Abjad is an orthographic system where not all vowels are expressed, such as Arabic or Hebrew.

3 Uyghur, a Turkic language spoken mainly in China, is still written using adapted Arabic characters.

4 Before the National Heritage Act was passed, the only official mention to Jawi was a proviso added in 1971 to the 1963 Language Act (which states that ‘the script of the national language shall be the Rumi script’), which specifies that ‘the Jawi script is not prohibited for use’ (Omar, 1979, p. 66).

5 This is a very late addition, introduced by the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature) in the 1990s (Taib Osman, 2004, p. 78).

6 Research on the language of signs actually predates Landry and Bourhis’s article, dating back at least to the 1970s (Backhaus, 2007, p. 12; Spolsky, 2009, pp. 26–27), but it was only sporadic and not considered part of the same field of research.

7 ‘Display’ typefaces are used for ‘short blocks of text in larger point sizes’, contrasting with ‘text’ typefaces, which are used for ‘long blocks of text in smaller point sizes’ (Amare & Manning, 2012, p. 7).

8 I would like to thank my colleagues Eugenia Conde Noguerol and Patricia Nora Riget for allowing me to test their students during class time.

9 However, compared to the answers provided by the students, those provided for the first eight questions by the teachers and lecturers, even though statistically insignificant, on the whole showed more negative attitudes on the part of the Chinese and Indians, and a stronger defensiveness and downplay of Jawi as related to Malayness and Islam on the part of the Malay respondents.