Indonesian orthography

Indonesian orthography refers to the official spelling system used in the Indonesian language. The current system uses the Latin script and is called Ejaan yang Disempurnakan, commonly translated as Enhanced Spelling, Perfected Spelling or Improved Spelling.

History

The Perfected Spelling system is a system of orthography released in 1972 to replace the preexisting Republican Spelling System. A joint initiative of Indonesia and neighboring country Malaysia, the aim of the change in 1972 was to introduce greater harmonization of the Indonesian and Malay-language orthographies. The new EYD system, adopted on the 27th anniversary of Indonesia's independence on 17 August 1972, was decreed by President Suharto on the previous day. Government departments were instructed to begin using the EYD system on 1 January 1973. On 27 August 1975, the Minister of Education and Culture issued a decree which provided a detailed explanation of the changes in the new system and marked the official use of the EYD system. It was formerly known as the Indonesian Spelling System, often referred to as the Indonesian Spelling System General Guidelines, between 2015 and 2022.

Characteristics

Foreign loan letters

Letters that had previously been included in the Republican Spelling as foreign loan letters are officially used in the EYD Spelling.

Letters	Example	English meaning
f	maaf, fakir	sorry, poor
v	vakum, universitas	vacuum/hiatus, university
z	zaman, lezat	age/era, delicious

Q and X

The letters Q and X are used in scientific subjects, for example sinar-X.
The letter Q is also used as needed for Islamic subjects. Examples include Quran, Al-Furqan, and Al-Baqarah. This letter is also used in some placenames in Indonesia, e.g. the and districts in West Kutai Regency, and Baqa, the capital of Samarinda Seberang, Samarinda.

Affixes and prepositions

The writing of di- and ke- can be distinguished from di and ke, where di- and ke- are written together with the words that follow them, for example diambil, kehendak, while di and ke are written separately from the words that follow them, for example di rumah, ke pasar. This is different from the former Republican Spelling, where both di- and di are written together with the words following them. However, many native speakers often do not follow this orthographic rule, and confuse both morphemes.
Dutch linguist K. Alexander Adelaar viewed that the prefix di- derives instead from the preposition di, and rejected other etymological theories, such as it coming from the Old Malay prefix ni-.

Reduplication

Reduplication, mostly used in the plural form of words, has to be fully written with letters, so the use of a superscripted number 2 as in the Republican Spelling is no longer valid. The practice remains common in informal usage such as in text messaging.

Republican	EYD	English meaning
anak²	anak-anak	children
ber-main²	bermain-main	playing around
ke-barat²-an	kebarat-baratan	westernish

Exceptions

Exceptions mostly come from proper nouns. Many personal names, particularly of younger people, do not follow the orthographic rules. Common spelling variations include doubled letters, a silent h following consonants, the use of Dutch digraphs, and other eccentric letters. However, a few variations come from other parts of speech, such as mag which is actually pronounced as or even, deriving from Dutch maag; and bus, pronounced as or, also from Dutch bus.

Changes

Various minor changes were announced after 1975:

On 9 September 1987, the Minister of Education and Culture issued a ministerial decree which updated the previous spelling system and remained valid for 22 years.
On 31 July 2009, the Minister of National Education issued a decree outlining further changes. The update included an optional diacritic for ⟨e⟩, to distinguish ⟨é⟩ and ⟨e⟩.
On 26 November 2015, the Minister of Education and Culture issued a ministerial regulation about the spelling system. For the first time, the term Indonesian spelling system was used. There were only minor changes compared to previous updates, including the addition of a new diphthong of ⟨ei⟩, optional diacritics for ⟨e⟩ as ⟨é⟩, ⟨è⟩, and ⟨ê⟩, and new rules on the usage of bold letters.
On 16 August 2022, in time for the spelling system's fiftieth anniversary, a new update for it was issued. It restored the term Perfected Spelling of the Indonesian Language. Like the previous update, it also introduced minor changes: among others, it introduced the monophthong ⟨eu⟩, mostly used in loanwords from Acehnese and Sundanese, reaffirmed the use of the optional diacritic ⟨ê⟩, and limited the use of number words to singular numbers.