Madurese Alphabet & Letters

Madurese calls itself Bhâsa Madhurâ, and the name already shows most of what is special about its spelling. Today it is written in the Latin alphabet, in the order A Â B C D Ḍ E È F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T Ṭ U V W X Y Z. The consonants work much as in Indonesian, with F, Q, V, X and Z found mainly in loanwords and names, and ng and ny each stand for one sound, as they do across Indonesia.

The four marked letters are of two kinds. The vowels â and è add sounds the five plain vowels cannot show, and the dotted ḍ and ṭ mark retroflex consonants, said with the tip of the tongue curled back. A written h after b, d, g and j marks the 'heavy', breathy consonants of Madurese, bh, dh, gh and jh, as in Bhâsa Madhurâ itself.

What â, è, ḍ and ṭ do in Madurese

â represents a back unrounded vowel [ɤ], and it is everywhere: bhâsa (language), Madhurâ, iyâ (yes, informal). è is an open e, as in English 'bed', in words such as orèng (person) and sèngko' (I, informal). Plain e keeps the short neutral sound it has in Indonesian, so e and è are different vowels and should not be swapped.

ḍ and ṭ are retroflex partners of d and t, sounds Madurese shares with Javanese and many languages of India; one spelling uses dots below, while the 2012 revised guide writes ṭ as th. In quick messages many people drop all the marks and write Madura or bahasa the Indonesian way, but dictionaries and schoolbooks keep them, because they are what tell a reader how a word is actually said.

The apostrophe, the speech levels and other punctuation

Madurese has a glottal stop, the catch in the throat between the two halves of English 'uh-oh', and writes it with an apostrophe at the end of words like ta' (not) and sèngko'. The straight ' and the typographic ’ are both used; word processors produce the curly one. Leaving the apostrophe out changes how the word is read, so keep it in names and careful writing.

Like Javanese, Madurese has speech levels: you choose different words depending on whom you speak to. The levels are named after their words for 'no' and 'yes': enjâ'-iyâ among equals and close family, èngghi-enten in the middle, and èngghi-bhunten for elders and formal occasions, and the names alone use â, è and the apostrophe. Other punctuation follows Indonesian, with quotation marks written “like this”. Prices are in Indonesian rupiah, written Rp before the amount (Rp 25.000); the rupiah has no Unicode sign of its own.

How to type Madurese letters on Windows, Mac and phone

On Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad: â Alt+0226, Â Alt+0194, è Alt+0232, È Alt+0200, curly apostrophe ’ Alt+0146. With the US-International layout, type ^ then a for â and ` then e for è. The dotted letters have no Alt code: in Word, type the code and press Alt+X (1E0D for ḍ, 1E0C for Ḍ, 1E6D for ṭ, 1E6C for Ṭ), or copy them from this page.

On a Mac, press Option+I then a for â and Option+` then e for è; add Shift on the letter for the capital. For ḍ and ṭ, switch to the ABC – Extended input source and press Option+X, then the letter. On Android and iPhone, hold down a or e and slide to â or è; most phone keyboards do not offer ḍ and ṭ, so copy them here. In HTML, use â, è, ḍ for ḍ and ṭ for ṭ.

Where Madurese is spoken, and its older scripts

Madurese is the language of Madura, the island off the north-east coast of Java in Indonesia 🇮🇩, and of the small islands around it such as Sapudi and Kangean. It is just as much at home in the eastern end of East Java, from Pasuruan and Probolinggo to Situbondo, Bondowoso and Jember, and Madurese communities live in cities and on other islands across Indonesia. One estimate counted about 7.8 million people who used Madurese for daily communication at home. Most speakers also use Indonesian, and many in East Java speak Javanese too.

Before the Latin alphabet, Madurese was written in two scripts: Carakan, the Madurese form of the Javanese script (see the Javanese collection for its letters), and Pegon, Arabic letters adapted for the languages of Java and Madura, still used in pesantren religious schools. Madurese is an Austronesian language; Javanese, Balinese, Sundanese and Indonesian are relatives, but it is a language of its own that Javanese speakers do not understand without learning it.