Kerinci Language Alphabet

Kerinci is the language of the Kerinci highlands in Jambi province, Sumatra: the valley around Lake Kerinci, Kerinci Regency and the city of Sungai Penuh. Its speakers write it in the Latin alphabet the way they write Indonesian, A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z, with no letters of its own; plain A–Z is all everyday writing needs.

There is no single standard Kerinci spelling in general use, so people simply spell what they hear with Indonesian conventions (some dictionaries and linguistic texts add vowel marks such as ò or ê to show dialect vowels): ng and ny for the nasal sounds, and the occasional kh or sy in words from Arabic. F, Q, V, X and Z belong mostly to loanwords and names. Because nothing beyond A–Z is needed, Kerinci can be typed on any phone or computer exactly as Indonesian is.

What makes Kerinci different

Kerinci is a Malayic language, a close relative of Malay, Indonesian and Minangkabau, but it is famous among linguists for two things. The first is how much it varies: the speech of one village can differ noticeably from the next, and Kerinci people often tell where someone comes from by their vowels.

The second is that many Kerinci words have two shapes. Linguists call them the absolute and the oblique form: the same word changes its last syllable depending on its position in the phrase or construction. Studies of the Sungai Penuh dialect have made this one of the best-known puzzles of Indonesian linguistics. In writing, both shapes are spelled with ordinary letters.

Aksara Incung: the old Kerinci script

Before the Latin alphabet, Kerinci was written in its own script, Incung (surat incung or aksara incung). Its letters are angular strokes suited to scratching into hard surfaces, and the old texts survive on buffalo horn, bamboo, bark and palm leaf, kept by families and clans as heirlooms. Incung belongs to the Surat Ulu family of southern Sumatran scripts, together with the Rejang script and the scripts of Lampung.

Incung is not yet encoded in Unicode, so it cannot be copied as text; schools and cultural groups in Kerinci and Sungai Penuh teach it from charts and books. Its relative Rejang does have Unicode letters (ꤰ ꤱ ꤲ …), in the Rejang collection.

Quotes and typing for bahasa Kerinci

Punctuation follows Indonesian: full stops, commas and quotation marks written “like this”. On Windows the curly quotes are Alt+0147 for “ and Alt+0148 for ”; on a Mac, Option+[ and Option+Shift+[; on phones, hold the " key. Prices are in Indonesian rupiah, written Rp with a dot for thousands (Rp25.000); the rupiah has no Unicode sign of its own.

Where Kerinci is spoken

CLDR lists about 390,000 Kerinci speakers in Indonesia 🇮🇩; the language is also spoken by communities in Malaysia. Its main speech area includes Kerinci Regency and the city of Sungai Penuh, in a high valley in western Jambi province, ringed by forest and overlooked by Mount Kerinci 🌋, at 3,805 m the highest volcano in Indonesia. Kerinci speakers also use Indonesian for school, work and the media.

The valley is surrounded by Kerinci Seblat National Park 🏞️, the largest national park in Sumatra and part of the UNESCO-listed Tropical Rainforest Heritage of Sumatra, home of the Sumatran tiger 🐅. The neighbouring languages are Minangkabau to the north and west, Jambi Malay to the east and Rejang to the south; see their collections, and the Indonesian and Indonesia pages, for the wider picture.