Acehnese orthography refers to the writing and spelling systems of the Acehnese language, the co-official language of the province of Aceh, Indonesia. The standard writing system of Acehnese uses the Latin script. The Acehnese language is officially standardised and regulated within the qanun of Aceh, though the exact spelling standard used is left unspecified and is not agreed upon.
The popular standard for writing Acehnese is the Enhanced Spelling of the Acehnese Language (, EBAYD), which will be the main focus of this article, other spelling systems will be specified.
The Acehnese language has two coexisting spelling standards, EBAYD and Husaini.
EBAYD, also referred to as the Unsyiah Spelling System (), is a spelling system concieved in 1980 in Syiah Kuala University, Banda Aceh, as a mean to standardise and codify the Acehnese orthogrpahy. It is largely considered as the de-facto standard spelling of Acehnese, used in dictionaries and learning materials.
An alternative to EBAYD is Husaini's Spelling (), it's prevalent amongst former Free Aceh Movement (GAM) members, pro-independence members, and Acehnese refugees abroad, they avoid using EBAYD due to its association with the Soeharto regime. Due to its historical and modern usage by former GAM members, the spelling is colloquially known as the GAM spelling ().
EBAYD is based on the Enhanced Spelling System of Indonesian while Husaini is based on the Soewandi Spelling System. Both spellings employs similar diacritics to distinguish vowel sounds, which are based on the spelling system used by Snouck Hurgronje, which is why they are often referred to as the Snouck's Spelling. A distinction between EBAYD and Husaini is the glyph , where EBAYD merges it with and is no longer a separate glyph. Another distinct feature of both spellings is the way they spell palatal sounds. While EBAYD uses c, j, ny, y, and sy of the Enhanced Spelling, Husaini uses tj, dj, nj, j, and sj of the Soewandi Spelling respectively.
The standard spelling system employs basic 21 Latin letters with an additional 4 letters with diacritics:
Alongside the letters above, Acehnese also has 3 digraphs: eu , ng , and ny . Additionally, the grapheme represents at the end of a syllable, aspirated and murmured consonants are marked with the glyph placed after the consonant.
Acehnese also features vowel nasalization, which is marked with an apostrophe preceding the vowel.
The letters F, Q, V, X, and Z and the digraphs KH and SY are officially not a part of the Acehnese alphabet, though these letters still can be seen in both colloquial and formal texts.
F and SY can also be seen in dialectal speech and loanwords such as and , although their inclusion is debated, while Q, Z, and KH are mainly used in Arabic loanwords. V and X is rare to see in Acehnese writing, with few exceptions such as the regency of (also spelt as Meuraksa) in Banda Aceh.
Generally, loan words are nativised into Acehnese phonology, their changes are as follows:
Since the introduction of the Arabic script through the Malays, Acehnese became a literary language, although literacy was mostly restricted to scholars and royal courts. Since Dutch colonization, and later World War II and the establishment of Indonesia, Acehnese has been written in the Latin script, and Jawoe has largely fallen out of use.
Historically, Acehnese was written in an Arabic script called (; ), a modified variant of Jawi. Originally, Jawi was adopted to write Malay as a language of the court and most texts in Aceh was written in Malay, as Acehnese was only a spoken language at the time.
Acehnese Jawoe is not a phonetic writing system. Due to the prevalent usage of Malay Jawi, Jawoe was written and read similar to a heterogramic system, where a word would retain its original Malay or Arabic spelling but read in Acehnese. Acehnese also has 34 distinct vowels sounds, which the Arabic script, an Abjad writing system, couldn't represent sufficiently.
The earliest known romanisation of Acehnese is from 1888 by Hendrik August Nicolaas Catenius, a Major of the East Indies Infantry Army, in his trilingual phrase book , containing phrases in Dutch, Malay, and Acehnese.
In 1891, the Netherlands government appointed Snouck Hurgronje to Aceh, where he was able to collect many texts regarding Acehnese language and literature in his seven month stay. Because no popular romanisation of Acehnese has yet to exist at the time, Snouck repurposed the French alphabet to fit Acehnese, as he deems the phonemic inventory of both languages to be similar. He published his work in 1892, where he would describe his orthography, after further refining it, he released in 1906. Since then, most Acehnese writings in the Roman script has adopted his spelling conventions.
Snouck's spelling was further strengthened by Acehnese teachers and educators, including primary school teachers Mohammad Djam and Njak Tjoet, who used the spelling system through their book to teach Acehnese children how to read, and Muhammad Saleh, who wrote as a supplementary manual for . Several other literary books was produced, which primarily uses Snouck's spelling system, such as De Vries and Aboebakar's .
For several decades, most Acehnese romanisations follow Snouck's orthography, one of the standard reference for the new orthography is Djajadiningrat's , which uses a modified version of Snouck's. Publications of the Acehnese language in the latin script was limited, only after the end of World War II and the independence of Indonesia did it began to further develop, marked by the publications of Abdullah Arif's and Sjèh Min Djeureula's in 1946.
After World War II, the changes in Acehnese orthography has been largely in tandem with the national language of the newly independent Indonesia, the Indonesian language. As the Indonesian language goes through reforms, several individual Acehnese writers were quick to incorporate the spelling changes into their Acehnese writings. One key feature that stayed is the usage of diaresis e to write closing diphthongs, which was originally adopted to distinguish between the diphthong oë and monothong oe , this convention stayed until the late 70s.
Inspired by the granting of special autonomy to Aceh, efforts began to bring Acehnese back into school curriculum, which amplified the production of Acehnese school and course books. This motivated Acehnese educators from universities in Banda Aceh to attempt a standardisation of the language's spelling system, which culminated to the holding of in 1966. A standard was determined through Jauhari Ishak's in 1968.
In 1980, another seminar, , was convened by Ibrahim Hasan, which was attended by 73 expert linguists and educators, it was hosted on August 25th to 26th, 1980, in Syiah Kuala University, Banda Aceh. Several points was given to the mission of the seminar:
The spelling system that was agreed upon is the EBAYD, which is still in use to this day. The spelling system is based on Snouck's orthography with several adjustments to match the reforms of the Indonesian language, specifically the Enhanced Spelling System reform in 1972.
In 1992, another seminar was convened by Ibrahim Husein, director of the Centre for Islamic Cultural Research and Studies (P3KI), to publish a translation of the Quran in the style of an Acehnese poem by Mahjiddin Jusuf. The spelling used in the translation is known as the 1992 P3KI Spelling.
The P3KI spelling employs simplification of the Acehnese diacritics agreed upon in the 1980 seminar due to the difficulty to employ the diacritic symbols with the current available technology, they suggest that diacritics should be relegated to scientific writings and language teaching. Additional changes can also be seen through the spelling of Arabic sy, which is spelt consistently as ch. Another feature is the usage of a superscript comma to incidate vowel nasality, the symbol isn't used when a consonant is present before the vowel.
Below is a comparison table of words between previous Acehnese spellings in the Latin and Jawoe script.