Ngaju Dayak Language Alphabet

Ngaju is the language of the Ngaju Dayak people of Central Kalimantan (Kalimantan Tengah) in Indonesian Borneo, and today it is written in the Latin alphabet with the same spelling conventions as 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 accented or extra letters needed.

Sounds written with two letters work as in Indonesian: ng as in the name Ngaju itself, and ny. F, Q, V, X and Z turn up mainly in loanwords and names; native Ngaju words such as aku (I), ikau (you), kuman (to eat) and bahalap (good, fine, beautiful) need only the everyday letters.

Writing Ngaju: from missionary grammars to Indonesian spelling

Ngaju was studied and printed in the Latin alphabet early on. In the nineteenth century the German missionary August Hardeland of the Rhenish Mission worked among Ngaju speakers in southern Borneo and published a grammar, a Dayak–German dictionary and a Bible translation in the language, which he simply called 'Dayak'.

Modern Ngaju spelling follows Indonesian, so a sentence typed for a phone chat, a church bulletin or a local news site looks just like Indonesian on the page: same letters, same punctuation, same capitalisation. What gives it away is the vocabulary, not the alphabet.

Punctuation, prices and typing Ngaju

Punctuation follows Indonesian: full stops, commas, question marks 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+[; phone keyboards offer them when you hold down the " key. Plain straight quotes are just as common in chats.

Prices in Central Kalimantan are in Indonesian rupiah, written Rp immediately before the amount with a dot for thousands (Rp15.000). The rupiah has no Unicode sign of its own, so the two letters are all you need.

Where the Ngaju Dayak language is spoken

Ngaju is spoken by close to 900,000 people by a widely cited estimate (the Ngaju ethnic group is larger), all in Indonesia 🇮🇩, along the great rivers of Central Kalimantan: the Kahayan, the Kapuas and the Katingan, with Palangka Raya, the provincial capital on the Kahayan, and Kuala Kapuas as its main towns. The name is usually explained as 'upriver', a label for the people of the interior rivers as opposed to the coast. Ngaju has long served as a common language between the different Dayak groups of the province, and many speakers also use Indonesian and Banjar every day.

Ngaju belongs to the Barito branch of the Austronesian family. Its relatives include Ma'anyan and other Barito languages of southern Borneo, and, much farther away, Malagasy, whose ancestors sailed from this part of Borneo to Madagascar more than a thousand years ago. Indonesian, Banjar and Iban are more distant cousins in the same family.

Ngaju culture in words and emoji

Central Kalimantan's motto Isen Mulang, 'never retreat', is Ngaju, and so is the idea of huma betang, the longhouse 🛖 where many families once lived under one roof, now used as a picture of living together in harmony. Belom bahadat, 'living by adat (custom)', is another phrase you will see on banners and in speeches.

The old Ngaju religion, Kaharingan, is still practised and is officially recognised in Indonesia under Hinduism. Its world is ruled by an upperworld symbolised by the hornbill (tingang; there is no hornbill emoji, so people use 🐦) and an underworld symbolised by a watersnake, joined in the tree of life, Batang Garing 🌳. The best-known Kaharingan ceremony is the tiwah, a great second funeral in which the bones of the dead are moved to a carved family ossuary, the sandung. The mandau 🗡️, the Dayak sword, the gandang drum 🥁 and the orangutans 🦧 of Sebangau and Tanjung Puting national parks round out the emoji people reach for.