Javanese Alphabet & Script

Javanese (basa Jawa) is commonly written in the Latin alphabet; its traditional abugida, Aksara Jawa, is also called hanacaraka or carakan after its first letters. It grew out of the Kawi script of old Java, which goes back through the scripts of southern India to Brahmi, so it is a sister of Balinese ᬳᬦᬘᬭᬓ and Sundanese and a distant cousin of Thai and Devanagari. For centuries it was the script of court chronicles, poetry and letters in Yogyakarta and Surakarta; today it is taught in schools across Central Java, Yogyakarta and East Java and appears on street-name signs, palace gates, government buildings and wedding invitations.

Books, newspapers, phones and everyday chat use the Latin alphabet: a b c d e g h i j k l m n o p r s t u w y, with six consonant digraphs, dh, kh, ng, ny, sy and th, as in wedhus (goat), kutha (town), ngoko and nyuwun (to ask for). F, q, v, x and z turn up only in names and foreign words. Many letter values match Indonesian: c is the ch of 'church', j the j of 'jam' and y the y of 'yes'.

Javanese letters with accents: é, è, ê, å and the others

Plain Latin spelling hides some of Javanese's vowels, and dictionaries, grammars and language courses add accents to show them. The letter e does three jobs. Usually it is the short neutral vowel called pepet, like the a in English 'about', as in sega (rice) and sugeng (well, blessed); when a text marks it, it is ê. é is the closed e of kowé (you) and piyé kabaré? (how are you?), and è the open e, like the e of English 'bed'. In the script these are three different signs, pepet ꦼ for ê and taling ꦺ for both é and è.

The a of Javanese often sounds like the o in 'law': Jawa is said 'Jowo' and sega 'sêgo'. Standard spelling keeps the a, which is why people chatting often write Jowo or piye kabare the way they speak; some teaching texts and phonetic spellings write it å, as in Jåwå. Unicode's locale data (CLDR) also lists â, ì, ò and ù among Javanese letters; they turn up in some dictionaries and pronunciation guides to mark vowel quality, but there is no single agreed system. In everyday writing nearly everyone leaves all of these off.

How Aksara Jawa works: hanacaraka, sandhangan and pasangan

The script is an abugida: every consonant letter carries the vowel a, so ꦏ reads ka and ꦗꦮ is Jawa. The 20 basic letters (aksara nglegena) are learned in a fixed order that forms a little poem, ha na ca ra ka, da ta sa wa la, pa dha ja ya nya, ma ga ba tha nga: ꦲ ꦤ ꦕ ꦫ ꦏ ꦢ ꦠ ꦱ ꦮ ꦭ ꦥ ꦝ ꦗ ꦪ ꦚ ꦩ ꦒ ꦧ ꦛ ꦔ. A native word that begins with a vowel is written with ꦲ ha as its carrier.

Vowel signs, sandhangan, change the a: wulu ꦶ above for i, suku ꦸ below for u, taling ꦺ in front for é or è, taling with tarung ꦺ...ꦴ around the letter for o, and pepet ꦼ above for ê. Final sounds have their own marks: cecak ꦁ adds -ng, layar ꦂ -r and wignyan ꦃ -h, so sugeng rawuh (welcome) is ꦱꦸꦒꦼꦁꦫꦮꦸꦃ. Pangkon ꧀ cancels the vowel; it stays visible at the end of a sentence, as in ꦩꦠꦸꦂꦤꦸꦮꦸꦤ꧀ (matur nuwun). Inside a sentence, where a consonant with no vowel meets the next one, as the n of mangan meets the s of sega, the second is written as a pasangan, a small form hung under or beside the first. In Unicode you type pangkon followed by the consonant and the font draws the pasangan: ꦩꦔꦤ꧀ꦱꦼꦒ.

Aksara murda, extra letters, digits and pada punctuation

Eight letters have a grand form, aksara murda (ꦟ ꦑ ꦡ ꦯ ꦦ ꦘ ꦓ ꦨ), written in the names and titles of people, places and institutions one wants to honour; they work a little like capitals, but a sentence does not start with one. The aspirated mahaprana letters such as ꦙ and ꦰ, the independent vowels ꦄ ꦆ ꦈ ꦌ ꦎ (aksara swara), and ca murda ꦖ serve mainly Sanskrit and Old Javanese words, foreign names and loanwords. Sounds borrowed from Arabic and other languages are written as aksara rekan, a basic letter with cecak telu ꦳ above: ꦥ꦳ for f, ꦗ꦳ for z.

Javanese digits run ꧐ ꧑ ꧒ ꧓ ꧔ ꧕ ꧖ ꧗ ꧘ ꧙. Because several look like letters, a number in running text sits between two pada pangkat ꧇, as in ꧇꧒꧐꧒꧖꧇ for 2026. Pada lingsa ꧈ works like a comma and pada lungsi ꧉ like a full stop; pada adeg-adeg ꧋ opens a paragraph and pada piseleh ꧌ ꧍ bracket a quotation or an aside. Traditional letters open with a mark chosen by rank: pada andap ꧃ to someone of higher standing, pada madya ꧄ to an equal, pada luhur ꧅ to someone of lower standing. Text runs without spaces between words.

How to type Javanese letters: é è ê å and an Aksara Jawa keyboard

Windows: hold Alt and type on the number pad 0233 for é, 0232 for è, 0234 for ê and 0229 for å (capitals É 0201, È 0200, Ê 0202, Å 0197; â is 0226, ì 0236, ò 0242, ù 0249). With the US-International layout type ' then e for é, then e for è, ^ then e for ê, and AltGr+W for å. Mac: Option+E then e gives é, Option+ then e gives è, Option+I then e gives ê, and Option+A types å directly (Shift for capitals). On Android and iPhone, hold down e or a and slide to the accent. In HTML write é, è, ê and å.

Aksara Jawa has been in Unicode since version 5.2 (2009), in the block U+A980–U+A9DF, so the characters on this page paste as real text into documents, chats and social media. Your device needs a font for them, such as Noto Sans Javanese; without one you see empty boxes. To type the script, people install a Javanese keyboard app, use an online transliterator from Latin, or copy from a page like this one. Letters are stored in reading order, not drawing order: taling ꦺ is typed after its consonant even though it is drawn in front.

Where Javanese is spoken, its speech levels and its relatives

Javanese has about 96 million speakers by CLDR's estimate, which makes it the largest Austronesian language by number of native speakers. Almost all live in Indonesia 🇮🇩, in Central and East Java, Yogyakarta and the coasts of West Java, and in Javanese communities on Sumatra, Kalimantan and other islands; most also speak Indonesian. Smaller communities live in Malaysia 🇲🇾 and in Suriname 🇸🇷, descendants of Javanese contract workers brought there under Dutch rule, with more in New Caledonia and the Netherlands.

Javanese has speech levels: ngoko among family and friends, krama for elders, strangers and formal occasions, and krama inggil words for the person you are honouring. Thank you is casual suwun or polite matur nuwun; 'how are you' is ngoko piyé kabaré? but krama pripun kabaripun?. Its closest neighbours are Sundanese, Madurese and Balinese, and it has traded words with Malay and Indonesian for centuries; see their collections for their letters.