Sasak Alphabet & Script

Sasak (in Indonesian bahasa Sasak) is the language of the island of Lombok, and today it is almost always written in the Latin alphabet, spelled the way Indonesian is. Some Sasak spellings use accented vowels such as é, è, ó and ò to distinguish vowel sounds. c is the ch sound of cinta, j is the English j, and ng and ny are single sounds, as in nyale, the sea worm of Lombok's best-known festival. F, V, X and Z appear mainly in loanwords and names.

The one sound Indonesian spelling has no letter for is the glottal stop, the catch in the throat in English 'uh-oh', which Sasak often has at the end of a word. Many writers mark it with q: inaq 'mother', amaq 'father', ndeq 'not', araq 'there is'. Others write k, an apostrophe (ina') or leave it out, so the same word can turn up in several spellings; the q form is a common one in names and in writing about Sasak culture.

Aksara Sasak: the 18 letters and how they work

Before Latin letters, Sasak was written in its own script, Aksara Sasak, also called jejawan, a Java-Balinese script established in the Sasak literary tradition through historic Balinese influence. It is a close relative of the Javanese and Balinese scripts, all descended from the Kawi script of old Java. Its texts were scratched onto palm leaves bound into books called takepan, and many Lombok schools still teach the script as a local subject.

The basic set is the 18 letters (that is what people mean by 'aksara sasak 18'), learned in the order ha na ca ra ka, da ta sa wa la, ma ga ba nga, pa ja ya nya: ᬳ ᬦ ᬘ ᬭ ᬓ ᬤ ᬢ ᬲ ᬯ ᬮ ᬫ ᬕ ᬩ ᬗ ᬧ ᬚ ᬬ ᬜ. Every letter carries the vowel a; signs placed above, below or before it change the vowel to i ᬶ, u ᬸ, é ᬾ, o ᭀ or the neutral e ᭂ, and further marks add a final -ng ᬂ, -r ᬃ or -h ᬄ. A vowel-cancelling mark ᭄ ends a word on a bare consonant and, between two consonants, makes the second one hang below the first, so Sasak is written ᬲᬲᬓ᭄.

Sasak script in Unicode, and how to type Sasak

Unicode has no separate Sasak block. Sasak script is typed with the characters of the Balinese block (added in Unicode 5.0, 2006), so on screen the letters take Balinese shapes, which differ a little from the Sasak hand of the old manuscripts. That block includes seven letters named after Sasak, proposed in the late 20th century as Sasak extensions but little used: ᭅ kaf, ᭆ khot, ᭇ tzir, ᭈ ef, ᭉ ve, ᭊ zal and ᭋ asyura. The Javanese block (Unicode 5.2, 2009) adds one more, ꦐ Ka Sasak. All of them are in the grid above, ready to copy.

The basic A–Z letters need no special keys, though some Sasak spellings use accented vowels. For the curly apostrophe ’ hold Alt and type 0146 on Windows, or press Option+Shift+] on a Mac; quotation marks “ ” are Alt+0147 and Alt+0148, or Option+[ and Option+Shift+[. In HTML they are ’, “ and ”. To write in the script itself, install a Balinese-script font such as Noto Sans Balinese and a Balinese keyboard (Keyman offers several), or simply copy the letters from this page.

Where the Sasak language is spoken

Sasak is spoken by the Sasak people of Lombok, in the province of West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia 🇮🇩, by an estimated 2.7 million people; most of them also speak Indonesian, the national language. Lombok lies just east of Bali, and the two languages are close relatives: together with Sumbawa, spoken on the next island east, they form the small Bali–Sasak–Sumbawa group of the Austronesian family, more distant cousins of Javanese and Indonesian.

Like Javanese and Balinese, Sasak has speech levels: a refined register (alus) for elders, nobles and formal occasions and a common one for everyday talk, so 'I' can be polite tiang or plain aku. It also has several dialects, which Sasak speakers name after their words for 'like this – like that': Ngeno-ngene, Meno-mene, Ngeto-ngete, Kuto-kute and Meriaq-meriku.