Cham Jawi Letters (Western Cham)

Western Cham is the language of the Cham of Cambodia, spoken by an estimated 260,000 people (a CLDR estimate) in villages along the Mekong and the Tonle Sap and around Phnom Penh, and by smaller communities in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. Their ancestors lived in Champa, on the coast of what is now central and southern Vietnam; the Cham who stayed there speak Eastern Cham, and after centuries apart the two are separate languages.

The Cham of Cambodia are Muslims, and most of them write Cham in Jawi, the Arabic letters as adapted for Malay, which reached them through centuries of contact with the Malay world; Cham communities in Vietnam's Mekong Delta also write in Jawi. Their old native script, Akhar Srak, is kept above all by the Imam San community. Latin letters appear too, but only as informal romanisations with no agreed spelling, in dictionaries, language studies and casual messages, so they are not a standard way to write Cham; the plain A–Z covers them.

The Cham Jawi alphabet: Arabic letters and Cham additions

Cham Jawi uses the Arabic alphabet in its usual order and adds letters for sounds Arabic does not have. From Malay Jawi it takes چ for c, ڠ for ng and ڬ for g. For the implosive consonants that make Cham sound like Cham, it adds letters of its own: ڢ for the implosive b (written bb or mb in romanisation), ڎ for the implosive d (đ or nd) and څ for the sound written nj. ڤ, the Malay pa, is written pp in romanisation, while ف, the Arabic f, stands for p, because Cham has no f.

Some Arabic letters do new jobs. Cham r is pronounced far back in the throat, so it is written with غ as often as with ر. ع carries a syllable that starts with a vowel, and ء at the end of a syllable writes the catch in the throat that romanisations spell -k. Breathy and aspirated consonants are written as pairs, such as كح kh, تح th, به bh and ده dh. Letters such as ث ذ ص ض ط ظ and خ appear mainly in words from Arabic. The letter values in the grid follow the Cham–Malay dictionary of Majid Yunos (Kuala Lumpur, 2010); Cham Jawi has no official standard, and spelling varies from village to village; sources differ, for example, on the letter for ny.

Writing Cham vowels in Jawi

Malay Jawi leaves many vowels unwritten, but Cham has many more vowels than Malay, so Cham Jawi tries to write nearly every one, with dots and small marks on the vowel letters ا و ي. The vowel ư is written as alif with three dots, and ơ as alif with a small inverted v: اٛ.

Unicode has no single letter for alif with three dots, so it is typed as ا followed by the small high three dots mark ۛ, which gives اۛ. Because that mark was missing from keyboards, many writers use the inverted v ٛ for ư and the plain small v ٚ for ơ instead, and some texts use one mark for both vowels. When you read Cham Jawi, let the word tell you which vowel is meant.

Akhar Srak, the Cham script you cannot type yet

Western Cham also has its own Indian-derived script, Akhar Srak, which some writers call Ka-Kha after its first two letters. It is related to the Khmer script, it has been kept above all by the Imam San community, and it is now being revived in other villages. Akhar Srak is not in Unicode: a Western Cham block at U+1E200–U+1E26F was proposed in 2020 (document L2/20-061R3), a rival proposal followed in 2022, and community members disagree about the details, so it is not part of Unicode 18.0. Until it is encoded, Akhar Srak text can only be shared as images or in custom fonts that are not interchangeable.

Do not use the Unicode Cham block (U+AA00–U+AA5F, letters such as ꨀ ꨆ ꨌ) for Western Cham. That block encodes Akhar Thrah, the script of Eastern Cham in Vietnam; the two scripts have drifted so far apart that Western Cham readers cannot read Akhar Thrah, and the proposers of the Western Cham block report that the community strongly objects to its texts being shown in Eastern Cham letters. This site has no Eastern Cham collection yet; the Cham block's letters each have their own page.

How to type Cham Jawi

Every phone and computer has an Arabic keyboard, and it types the Arabic letters of Cham Jawi, together with أ ة ء and the Arabic comma ، and question mark ؟. Jawi keyboard apps made for Malay add ڠ ڤ چ, and some add ڬ. The Cham letters ڢ ڎ څ are on very few keyboards, so the easy way is to copy them from this page.

If you need to type them often, use the code: in Microsoft Word type 6A2, 68E or 685 and press Alt+X for ڢ, ڎ or څ; on a Mac switch to the Unicode Hex Input source and hold Option while typing the four-digit code (06A2, 068E or 0685); in HTML write ڢ, ڎ or څ. Jawi runs right to left and the letters join to each other; paste them and the font joins them for you. If ڢ ڎ څ show as boxes, install an Arabic font with wide coverage of the extended Arabic letters.

Where Western Cham is spoken, and its relatives

Nearly all Western Cham speakers live in Cambodia 🇰🇭, where almost all of them also speak Khmer and pay in riel ៛ and US dollars $; smaller communities live in southern Vietnam 🇻🇳, and families who left in the war years of the 1970s live in Malaysia, the United States and elsewhere. Kampong Cham province is named after them.

Cham belongs to the Chamic branch of the Austronesian family. Its closest relatives are Eastern Cham, the highland languages of Vietnam such as Jarai and Rade, and Acehnese at the northern tip of Sumatra; further off it is related to Malay. See the Malay (Arabic) collection for Jawi as Malay writes it, the Arabic, Malay, Acehnese, Khmer and Vietnamese collections, and the Cambodia and Vietnam pages for the emoji of the two countries.