New Rumi Spelling

New Rumi Spelling (Malay: Ejaan Rumi Baharu) is the most recent spelling reform of Rumi script (Latin derived Malay script) in Malaysia. It was adopted in 1972 to replace both the Za'ba and Congress spelling systems.

Historically, the two major Malay-speaking countries, Indonesia and Malaysia, were divided between two colonial administrations, the Dutch and the British. Thus, the development of spelling systems for Rumi script were greatly influenced by the orthographies of their respective colonial tongues. Shortly after the end of Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation in 1966, a common spelling system became among the first items on the agenda of a detente between the two countries.

The new spelling system, known as 'New Rumi Spelling' in Malaysia and 'Perfected Spelling System' in Indonesia, was officially announced in both countries on 16 August 1972. Although the representations of speech sounds are now largely identical in the Indonesian and Malaysian varieties, a number of minor spelling differences remain.

The first known attempt to use Latin script or 'Rumi', for writing Malay words was by Duarte Barbosa in 1518 in Melaka, shortly after the conquest of 1511. Few years later in 1522, the world's first Malay-European dictionary was compiled by Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian companion of Ferdinand Magellan. This was subsequently followed by many other European traders, adventurers, explorers and scholars who invented their own Rumi spelling systems. Among notable Rumi spelling systems that existed before the 20th century were the orthographies of Cornelis de Houtman (1595), Davidis Haex (1631),Thomas Bowrey (1701), J.Howison (1800),William Marsden (1812), Claudius Thomsen (1820),John Crawfurd (1848),Straits Settlements (1878),Frank Swettenham (1881), and William Edward Maxwell (1882). All these systems were mainly developed by using the method of transliteration from Jawi (Arabic-derived Malay script). The divergences of various spelling systems that existed in colonial Malaya, necessitates the need for a commonly accepted spelling system. A major orthographic reform was initiated by a British scholar administrator, Richard James Wilkinson in 1904, from which the Wilkinson spelling was introduced, and became the official system widely used in all British colonies and protectorates in Malaya, Singapore and Borneo. In 1924, another reform was devised by a notable Malay grammarian, Za'ba, which later adopted in all schools from the 1930s onwards. After the short-lived Fajar Asia system used during Japanese occupation (1941-1945), the Third Malay Congress introduced the Congress system in 1956. The innovative Congress System gained a widespread currency through published works, but remain impractical for the use of the masses. In the meantime, the schools and the government publications continued using the Za'aba system. Hence, the general public became increasingly confused with the existence of different spelling systems. As a result, it was common during this era to find several spelling systems concurrently used in printed media and individual writings.

...
Wikipedia