Indonesian orthography

The Perfected Spelling system is a system of orthography released in 1972 to replace the existing Republican Spelling System (RSS, also called the Soewandi Spelling System, SSS). A joint initiative of Indonesia and neighbouring country Malaysia (which also introduced the similar Joint Rumi Spelling system), the aim of the change in 1972 was to introduce greater harmonisation 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 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 (, EBI), often referred to as the Indonesian Spelling System General Guidelines (, PUEBI), between 2015 and 2022. == Characteristics ==

Republican-to-EYD letter changes Foreign loan letters Letters that had previously been included in the Republican Spelling as foreign loan letters are officially used in the EYD Spelling. Q and X The letters Q and X are used in scientific subjects, Examples include Quran, Al-Furqan, and Al-Baqarah. This letter is also used in some placenames in Indonesia (often derived from the local languages), e.g. the and districts in West Kutai Regency, and Baqa, the capital of Samarinda Seberang, Samarinda (all of these examples are located in East Kalimantan). Affixes and prepositions The writing of di- and ke- (prefixes) can be distinguished from and (prepositions), where di- and ke- are written together with the words that follow them, for example, , ('taken', 'desire'), while and are written separately from the words that follow them, for example, , ('at home', 'to the market'). This differs from the former Republican Spelling, where both di- and are written together with the words following them. 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words, has to be fully written with letters, so the use of a superscripted number 2, as in the Republican Spelling, is no longer valid.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. == Exceptions ==

Exceptions mostly come from proper nouns. Many personal names, particularly of younger people, do not follow the orthographic rules (see Indonesian names). Common spelling variations include doubled letters, a silent h following consonants, the use of Dutch digraphs (which stems from Van Ophuijsen spelling), and other eccentric letters. However, a few variations come from other parts of speech, such as ('gastritis'), which is actually pronounced as or even , deriving from Dutch ; and , pronounced as or , also from Dutch . ==Changes 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⟩ (previously there were only 3 diphthongs, ai, au and oi), optional diacritics for ⟨e⟩ as ⟨é⟩ , ⟨è⟩ , and ⟨ê⟩ , and new rules on the usage of bold letters (abolition of bold letters for lemma entries in its dictionary). On 16 August 2022, in time for the spelling system's 50th anniversary, a new update 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. ==See also==