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BY 4.0 license Open Access Published by De Gruyter 2019

A Collection of Unstandardised Consistencies? The Use of Jawi Script in a Few Early Malay Manuscripts from the Moluccas

From the book Creating Standards

  • Jan van der Putten

Abstract

Jawi, a form of Arabic script in use in insular Southeast Asia, has been employed for writing Malay manuscripts for at least eight centuries (13th-20th centuries). Introduced and disseminated through Islamic canonical texts such as the Qur’an, it became the principal means of communication and knowledge production over the years and across the region. Studies of Malay palaeography and orthography have been rare and far between, and are mainly limited to colonial scholars designing the rules to be taught in the educational system and a number of surveys that record the orthography of certain texts. Inspired by a recent publication which concisely discusses the palaeography and orthography of 60 dated or datable Malay manuscripts, the following chapter will expand on some of the observations made by the scholars. I will discuss a number of 17th-19th-century manuscripts originating from the Moluccas and compare some characteristics of their orthography with those of the Hikayat Tanah Hitu, a Malay historical narrative compiled in the mid-17th century. In this exploration of orthographic consistencies and peculiarities in Malay manuscripts originating from one region, I argue that the ambiguity of Jawi was a welcome characteristic that could accommodate the needs of multilingual communities found in the Malay world.

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston
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