Acehnese Alphabet & Letters

Acehnese (Bahsa Acèh) is written today in the Latin alphabet. The widely used EBAYD spelling orders its letters A B C D E É È F G H I J K L M N O Ô Ö P Q R S T U V W X Y Z. The consonants work much as they do in Indonesian, and F, Q, V, X and Z turn up mainly in loanwords and names. What sets the alphabet apart is the vowels: the language has more vowel sounds than the five letters a e i o u can hold, so it adds accents to e and o.

Many consonant sounds are written with two letters, as in Indonesian and Malay: ng as in gampông (village), ny, and the clusters typical of Acehnese such as lh in lhèë (three). Vowels can also be written with two letters: eu stands for one unrounded vowel, made with the tongue where u is said but with spread lips, as in meunasah (the village prayer hall) and Seuramoë.

What é, è, ë, ô and ö do in Acehnese

Plain e is the short neutral vowel (the a in English 'about'), the sound Indonesian also writes as e. é is a closed e, close to the vowel of French 'été', and è is an open e, as in English 'bed'; the name of the language itself is spelled Acèh with it. In older spellings, ë appears as the second half of the diphthong oë, as in Seuramoë; the widely used EBAYD spelling does not list it as a separate letter.

For o there are three letters. ô is the o of Lôn (I, polite) and gampông, and o and ö mark two other back vowels that one plain letter could not tell apart. Indonesian spells these words Aceh and gampong, without the marks, and spelling in Acehnese varies between writers; dictionaries and learning materials in the EBAYD standard keep the marks.

The apostrophe and other Acehnese punctuation

In the widely used EBAYD spelling, an apostrophe marks nasal vowels; a hyphen separates adjacent vowels that could be misread, as in rapa-i, the large frame drum played in rows by Acehnese men. Either the straight apostrophe ' or the typographic ’ is used; the curly one is what word processors produce and looks better in print.

Otherwise Acehnese punctuation follows Indonesian: full stops, commas, question marks, and quotation marks written “like this”. Prices are written in Indonesian rupiah as Rp followed by the amount (Rp 15.000), with a dot as the thousands separator; the rupiah has no symbol of its own in Unicode, so the letters R and p are all you need.

How to type Acehnese letters on Windows, Mac and phone

On Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad: é Alt+0233, è Alt+0232, ë Alt+0235, ô Alt+0244, ö Alt+0246; capitals É Alt+0201, È Alt+0200, Ë Alt+0203, Ô Alt+0212, Ö Alt+0214; the curly apostrophe ’ is Alt+0146. With the US-International layout, type ' then e for é, ` then e for è, " then e for ë, ^ then o for ô and " then o for ö.

On a Mac, press Option+E then e for é, Option+` then e for è, Option+U then e for ë, Option+I then o for ô and Option+U then o for ö; add Shift on the second key for the capital. On Android and iPhone keyboards, hold down e or o and slide to the accented form. In HTML the entities are é, è, ë, ô and ö.

Where Acehnese is spoken, and its Jawi past

Acehnese is the language of Aceh, the province at the northern tip of Sumatra in Indonesia 🇮🇩, spoken by an estimated 3.9 million people, most along the coasts and in the capital Banda Aceh. Most speakers also use Indonesian, the national language, and neighbours in the province speak other languages of their own, such as Gayo in the central highlands.

Before the Latin alphabet, Acehnese was written in Jawi, the Arabic-based script also used for Malay, which in Aceh is called Jawoë. The long verse epics called hikayat were written and recited in it; see the Arabic collection for its letters. Acehnese belongs to the Chamic branch of the Austronesian family, so its closest relatives are not its Sumatran neighbours but the Cham languages of Vietnam and Cambodia; Indonesian, Malay, Minangkabau and Javanese are more distant cousins.