Pattani Malay Jawi Letters

Pattani Malay is the everyday language of the Malay Muslims of southern Thailand, in the provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat and in parts of neighbouring Songkhla. Its speakers call it baso Nayu or kecek Nayu, "the Malay language" or "Malay talk", while in Thai it is usually called Yawi, a name that comes from Jawi, the script. It is the speech of the old Sultanate of Patani, which ruled this coast for centuries before it came under Siam, and of the pondok religious schools that made Patani one of the great centres of Islamic learning in Southeast Asia.

Pattani Malay sounds quite different from Standard Malay. It is closest to Kelantan Malay, spoken just across the border in Malaysia 🇲🇾: a final a becomes o, so mana (where) is mano, and many final consonants are worn down, so makan (eat) is make. It has also taken many words from Thai. Most speakers learn Thai at school, and Standard Malay is the language of religious books, sermons and Jawi writing.

Jawi letters: Arabic script for Malay

Jawi is the Arabic alphabet as Malays have used it for centuries, from Patani and Kelantan to Malaysia, Brunei, Sumatra and Aceh. It runs right to left, the letters join and change shape inside a word, and short vowels are not written with marks: Malay spells vowels out with alif ا, wau و and ya ي, so Melayu is ملايو and Jawi is جاوي. Arabic letters such as ث ح خ ذ ص ض ط ظ ع غ ق are kept for words taken from Arabic, above all the vocabulary of Islam.

Arabic has no letters for several Malay sounds, so Jawi adds six, each an Arabic letter with extra dots: چ ca (the ch of cantik, beautiful), ڠ nga (the ng of bunga, flower: بوڠا), ڤ pa (Patani is ڤطاني), ݢ ga (gajah, elephant: ݢاجه), ڽ nya (nyanyi, to sing: ڽاڽي) and ۏ va, a late addition for borrowed words. The hamzah ء marks a glottal stop, ta marbutah ة ends some Arabic words, and the dotless ى (ye) sits at the end of certain words. Jawi spelling in Pattani follows written Standard Malay rather than local pronunciation, so a Pattani reader says mano where the page writes مان (mana).

How to type Jawi letters

Any Arabic keyboard types the letters Jawi shares with Arabic, and a Persian (Farsi) layout adds چ and ک. For the Malay letters ڠ ڤ ݢ ڽ ۏ you need a Jawi keyboard, available as free layouts and phone keyboard apps, or you can copy them from this page. Pasted Jawi joins up by itself as long as the app supports right-to-left text; a font made for Jawi draws the extra letters best.

In HTML the six extra letters are چ چ, ڠ ڠ, ڤ ڤ, ݢ ݢ, ڽ ڽ and ۏ ۏ. Watch for look-alikes: ڠ is ain with three dots, not ghain غ with one, and ڤ (three dots, pa) is not ف (one dot, fa).

Jawi, Thai script and Rumi in Pattani today

In Thailand's deep south, Jawi is learned with the Quran and used in pondok schools, mosques, and religious books, and signs often carry Malay in Jawi beside Thai. Many people also write Malay in Rumi, the Latin alphabet used in Malaysia, especially online, and Pattani Malay has been written in Thai letters for mother-tongue schooling, so a speaker may move between three scripts in one day.

Money is the Thai baht ฿, and the flag people use is 🇹🇭. For the Latin-letter Malay of Malaysia see the Malay collection, for the Arabic letters with every vowel mark see Arabic, and for the Thai letters see Thai; the country collection Thailand gathers its flag and emoji.

Where Pattani Malay is spoken

CLDR estimates about 3.5 million speakers of Pattani Malay, all of them in Thailand: in Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat, where Malay Muslims are the majority, and in southern districts of Songkhla. Its nearest relatives are Kelantan Malay and the other Malay varieties of the peninsula; Acehnese and the Cham languages, also written in Jawi, are more distant cousins.