Malay Alphabet & Letters

Malay (bahasa Melayu, in Malaysia also bahasa Malaysia) is written today with the same 26 letters as English, in the same order, and it has no accented letters at all: everything in a Malay newspaper, a government form or a WhatsApp chat can be typed on an ordinary US keyboard. Malays call this Latin writing Rumi; the older script, still taught and still used, is Jawi, and it has its own collection here.

Spelling follows the sound closely. c is always the sound of English 'ch' (cantik, beautiful), j is the j of 'jam', y the y of 'yes', and r is tapped or rolled, though in much of the peninsula it fades at the end of a word. Five letter pairs each write a single sound: ng (bunga, flower), ny (nyanyi, sing), sy (syarikat, company), kh (khabar, news) and gh (ghairah, passion); the last three come mostly with words from Arabic. Q, V, X and Z turn up mainly in loanwords and names.

When spelling aloud, Malaysians usually name the letters the English way, ei, bi, si, di, while Indonesians use names close to Dutch, a, be, ce, de. The Indonesian Alphabet collection lists those.

Does Malay have accents? The two sounds of e

No. Standard Malay spelling uses no diacritics, so when people search for Malay accent letters, the answer is the plain alphabet. The one letter that hides two sounds is e. Malay teachers call them e pepet, the short neutral vowel like the a of English 'about' (besar, big; emas, gold), and e taling, a clear e as in English 'bed' (meja, table; elok, fine).

Native speakers know which is meant from the word, and a few words are told apart only by it: perang with e pepet is war, with e taling it is the golden brown of rambut perang, fair hair. Learners simply learn each word with its sound.

Old Malay spelling: ch, sh, kampong and the 1972 reform

Before 1972, Malaysia and Singapore wrote Malay in an older Rumi spelling, often called Za'ba spelling after the scholar who shaped it: ch where today there is c (chakap for cakap, speak), sh for sy (sharikat), and o or e in many final syllables where today there is u or i (kampong, burong, bilek for kampung, burung, bilik). Indonesia had its own Dutch-based spelling with tj, dj and oe.

In 1972 Malaysia and Indonesia brought in a common new spelling, so the two standards have been written almost the same way ever since. Names and many place names kept the old forms, which is why you still see Kampong Glam in Singapore, Kampong Ayer (old spelling of air, water) in Brunei, and personal names spelt with ch and sh. Copy a name exactly as its owner writes it.

Malay punctuation and symbols: kanak-kanak, ², quotes and RM

The hyphen - is the busiest mark in Malay. Doubling a word makes a plural or adds variety or repetition, and the two halves are joined with a hyphen: kanak-kanak (children), buah-buahan (all sorts of fruit), rama-rama (butterfly), sama-sama (you're welcome). The hyphen also joins a prefix to a number, as in ke-69 (69th), and it follows al- in al-Quran. Older Malay print and handwriting wrote the doubled word with a raised two, kanak², and chat keeps the habit as budak2; formal writing spells the word out twice.

Standard Malay spells the word al-Quran, without an apostrophe; ' or ’ can appear in English-style contractions in Manglish chat. Quotations go in double quotes “like this”, and single quotes ‘ ’ give a word's meaning.

Malaysia writes numbers the English way, with a comma for thousands and a dot for decimals, unlike Indonesia. The ringgit has no Unicode sign: prices are written with the letters RM before the amount, RM12.50 or RM1,200. Singapore and Brunei both use the dollar sign $, written S$ and B$ when it matters which, and the two dollars are exchanged at par in both countries.

How to type Malay letters and symbols

Everyday Malay needs nothing beyond the letters on a standard keyboard, and Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei all use the US layout. For the extra marks on Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad: ² Alt+0178, “ Alt+0147, ” Alt+0148, ‘ Alt+0145 and ’ Alt+0146.

On a Mac, Option+[ gives “, Option+Shift+[ gives ”, Option+] gives ‘ and Option+Shift+] gives ’; the raised ² is in the Character Viewer (Control+Command+Space). On phones, many keyboards show ² when you hold down the 2, and the curly quotes when you hold down the quote key. In HTML the entities are ², “, ”, ‘ and ’.

Where Malay is spoken, and its relatives

Malay is the national language of Malaysia 🇲🇾, Brunei 🇧🇳 and Singapore 🇸🇬. CLDR estimates about 37 million speakers of Malay: about 26 million in Malaysia, about 9.6 million in Indonesia 🇮🇩, mainly in Sumatra and Borneo, about 840,000 in Singapore and about 460,000 in Brunei. These figures count Malay separately from Indonesian, itself a standardised form of Malay with an estimated 180 million speakers; Malaysians and Indonesians largely understand each other, though everyday words can differ: percuma means free of charge in Malaysia and in vain in Indonesia.

In Singapore, where English is the working language, Malay remains the national language: the national anthem, Majulah Singapura (Onward Singapore), is sung in Malay. In Brunei, Jawi stands beside Rumi on shop signs and road signs, and in Malaysia Jawi appears on banknotes and in religious life; the Malay (Arabic) collection has the six letters Jawi adds to Arabic. Malay's close neighbours in the region, Minangkabau, Banjar and Javanese, each have their own collection, as do the countries Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Brunei.