Malay is the national language of Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and (with 3 others) Singapore. Since 1972, these countries share the same orthography based on the Roman alphabet, which is generally good except for a few flaws:

• The letter e represents two different vowels, e and ə. Because of this, word pairs like perang and perang are spelled the same despite different meanings and pronunciations (blonde and war, in this case).
• There are no letters for ny and ng, which must be spelled as digraphs.
• Among sounds used only in foreign words, there are no letters for ʃ and x, which must be spelled as digraphs sy and kh.
• There is no letter for a glottal stop ʔ, which is sometimes spelled with an apostrophe, and sometimes with final k.
• The use of c j to spell ʧ ʤ is unusual for most Roman-alphabet readers (though not for us English-speakers).
• By writing the offglides in the diphthongs au ai oi as vowels, the orthography hides the fact that they are final consonants: bai is one syllable, while baik is two.

Musa solves all these problems.

Consonants

Here are the consonants of Malay, with the current letters in black and IPA in green. Foreign sounds are on yellow.

 m m	 n n	 ny ɲ	 ng ŋ
 p p	 t t	 c ʧ	 k k
 b b	 d d	 j ʤ	 g g
 w w	 s s	 y j	 h h
	 l l	 r r
 f f		 sy ʃ	 kh x
 v v	 z z		 ' ʔ

In Malay, the final -ng in prefixes meng- and peng- assimilates to the following consonant, and this is written in Musa (as it is in the current orthography).

Final k is pronounced as a Catch and written as , while h between vowels is pronounced and written as a Break  except when between two copies of the same vowel. Initial and final h can be pronounced or not - write it as you say it.

Vowels

The standard languages use 6 vowels, but two more (in pink) are used in some dialects.

 i  i		 u u
 e e	 ê ə	 o o
 e ɛ	 a a	 o ɔ
 au aw	 ai aj	 oi ɔj

Malay is usually written in the Alphabet gait.

Sample

Now that you've learned the letters, why don't you try reading a sentence?



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