Iban Alphabet & Letters

Iban (jaku Iban) is written in the Latin alphabet, and its standard spelling needs no accents or special characters. The letters of native Iban words are A B C D E G H I J K L M N O P R S T U W Y; F, Q, V, X and Z turn up only in loanwords and names. Everything can be typed on any keyboard, so this page is mainly for copying letters into designs, games and documents, and for seeing the alphabet in one place.

Two sounds that English spells awkwardly get letter pairs. ng is the sound at the end of English 'sing', and in Iban it can begin a word: ngajat, the warrior dance, and ngabang, visiting friends' homes during Gawai. ny is the sound in the middle of 'canyon', as in nyamai (comfortable, pleasant, tasty). Both are written as two letters; no single Unicode letter is used for them.

As in Malay, the letter e covers more than one vowel: often the short neutral vowel (the a in English 'about'), sometimes a clearer e. Readers tell them apart from the word itself, and standard spelling does not mark the difference.

Iban language words and how they are spelled

Iban belongs to the Malayic branch of the Austronesian languages and shares many related words with Malay, often through a regular sound match. Iban often ends a word in -ai where its Malay relative ends in -ang: Iban rumah panjai, the longhouse, is Malay rumah panjang, and Iban datai (come) is Malay datang. Other everyday words are its own: aku I, nuan you, jaku language or speech.

Longhouse life has its own vocabulary that Iban speakers keep even when speaking English or Malay: the ruai is the long shared gallery where people gather, each family's apartment is a bilik, and the headman is the tuai rumah. Tuak is the sweet rice wine served to guests, and pua kumbu is the patterned cloth woven by Iban women, used in ceremonies and hung up for Gawai.

Doubled words are written with a hyphen, as in Malay. The Gawai blessing gayu-guru, gerai-nyamai (long life, health and well-being) is printed both with hyphens and without them (Gayu Guru, Gerai Nyamai), so you will see either. Quotation marks follow Malaysian use, “like this”.

Selamat Ari Gawai: Gawai greetings and emoji

Gawai Dayak, the harvest festival of the Iban and the other Dayak peoples of Sarawak, falls on 1 June and is a public holiday there on 1 and 2 June. In Iban the greeting is Selamat Ari Gawai, gayu-guru, gerai-nyamai; the Malay form Selamat Hari Gawai (with an h) is widely used on posters and in national messages, and each is right in its own language.

The emoji people send with it are about the harvest and the party: 🌾 for the rice harvest, 🍚 for the rice itself, 🍶 standing in for tuak (there is no rice-wine emoji, and the sake bottle is the nearest), 🎉 for the celebration, 🐓 for the cockerel of the Gawai offerings, 🥁 and 🪘 for the drums, 🕺 and 💃 for the ngajat dance, and 🛖 for the longhouse, since there is no longhouse emoji.

For Sarawak itself people reach for 🐦 or 🪶 for the kenyalang, the rhinoceros hornbill that is the state's emblem (Sarawak is called Bumi Kenyalang, the Land of the Hornbills, and Unicode has no hornbill emoji), 🛶 for river travel by longboat, 🌳 for the rainforest and 🧵 for pua kumbu weaving.

Where the Iban language is spoken

Iban is the language of the Iban people, the largest ethnic group of Sarawak, the Malaysian state on the island of Borneo 🇲🇾. CLDR's figure of about 860,000 is for people literate in Iban and comfortable using it with computers; Iban is spoken in longhouses along Sarawak's rivers and in towns such as Kuching, Sibu, Miri and Sri Aman. It is taught as a school subject in Sarawak, and Iban radio and printed books have kept it a written language.

Iban communities also live across the border in West Kalimantan, Indonesia 🇮🇩, and in Brunei 🇧🇳. In Sarawak almost all Iban speakers also speak Malay, so Iban text often mixes with Malay words; see the Malay and Indonesian collections for their letters, and the Malaysia collection for the country's emoji and symbols. Prices are written in ringgit as RM (RM 10), and the ringgit has no Unicode sign of its own.

The Dunging script: a 20th-century Iban writing system

People searching for an 'ancient Iban alphabet' usually mean the Iban script created in the 20th century by Dunging anak Gunggu, an Iban man from Sarawak, to write the language in letters of its own. It is studied and displayed as part of Iban heritage, but it is not encoded in Unicode, so it cannot be copied and pasted as text; it appears only as images and in special fonts. Everyday written Iban, in books, schools, signs and messages, uses the Latin letters on this page.