Pegon (; also known as , ; , ) is a modified Arabic script used to write the Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese languages, as an alternative to the Latin script or the Javanese scriptJavanese script (Akṣara Carakan) on Omniglot. Retrieved 14 March 2019. and the Sundanese script.Sundanese script (Akṣara Sunda) on Omniglot. Retrieved 14 March 2019. It was used in a variety of applications, from religion, to diplomacy, to poetry. But today particularly, it is used for religious (Islamic) writing and poetry, particularly in writing commentaries of the Qur'an. Pegon includes letters that are not present in Modern Standard Arabic. Pegon has been studied far less than its Jawi counterpart which is used for Malay, Acehnese and Minangkabau.van der Meij, D. (2017). Indonesian Manuscripts from the Islands of Java, Madura, Bali and Lombok (p. 6). Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.
In the past few decades, the Indonesian language has grown in its prominence and role as the national language of Indonesia. Thus, publishing institutions associated with religious schools have further developed new teaching material, in order to expand the use of Pegon script to Indonesian language as well. The Indonesian language, being a variety of Malay, has also been written by the sister script of Pegon, Jawi.
Etymology The word Pegon originated from the Javanese word , meaning "deviate", due to the practice of writing the Javanese language with Arabic script, which was considered unconventional by Javanese people.
History One of the earliest dated examples of the usage of Pegon may be Masa'il al-ta'lim, a work on Islamic law written in Arabic with interlinear translation and marginal commentary in Javanese. The manuscript is dated 1623 and written on , a paper made from the bark of the mulberry tree.
Letters Pegon uses the original letters of the Arabic script plus an additional seven letters to represent native Javanese sounds not present in Arabic: , , , , , , and . One additional letter is used in foreign loanwords . These new letters are formed by the addition of dots to base letter forms. Pegon is not standardized and variation can be seen in how these additional letters are represented, most commonly in the position of the dots (above or below) and the number of dots (one, two or three). In more recent teaching material, additional letters have been added in order to use the script for writing Indonesian language.
Representation of vowels Vowel diacritics Arabic script is an impure abjad, meaning that for the most part, only consonants are written. Arabic has three vowels, which may be short or long. There are three letters in Arabic () that can also represent long vowels, but in general, short vowel diacritics are only used in religious texts and texts meant for beginner learners. The phonology of Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese is quite different. There are six vowels, and no marking of vowel length. So, the script has been adapted by using the vowel diacritics in conjunction with , and to fully represent the vowels of the languages of Java.Jamalin, F., & Rahman, A. A. (2021). Arabic-Java Writing System: How Javanese Language Adopts Arabic Script. Izdihar: Journal of Arabic Language Teaching, Linguistics, and Literature, 4(1), 43–58. https://doi.org/10.22219/jiz.v4i1.11337 (PDF) (Archive)
The prevalence of diacritic marking in Pegon varies from marking every letter, to being present only to differentiate particular vowel sounds. A version of the script which uses few diacritics, is called bare or bald (). To a fluent reader, the base letters are often sufficient to recognise word, rendering the diacritics unnecessary. So, for example, the word "Indonesia" may be written fully vocalised, ) or bare (). It is increasingly common in printed books to only consistently use the e-pepêt, with the other diacritics only used when disambiguation is needed.
Full marking of letters is common in most formal texts, including religious texts and historic diplomatic manuscripts.
+Vowel diacritics
Syllables A vowel at the beginning of a word is indicated by the letter alif , plus diacritic, and a follow-up letter or if required. If present, the follow-up letter is written with a sukun to indicate that it is part of the first syllable and not the start of a new one. A vowel following a consonant (such as the letter in the example below), a following vowel is indicated by diacritics but without the letter alif. +Vowel syllables vowel wordinitial bare vocalised + vowel bare vocalised
Consonant clusters In pegon, consonant clusters are written in two ways. In clusters that consist of a nasal consonant followed by a liquid consonant, such as [mr], [ml], or [ŋl], or of an obstruent consonant followed by a plosive consonant, such as [tr], [pl], or [by], the first consonant is modified by an epenthetic e-pepet .
When a consonant cluster consists of a nasal consonant followed by a plosive consonant, like [nj], [mb], or [nd], a prothetic alif is added to the beginning of the cluster.
+Some consonant clusters with epenthetic with prothetic
Vowel sequences
Vowel sequences follow certain general conventions. Variations besides these are also commonly seen in various books and manuscripts.
+ Vowel sequences (both bare and vocalised forms) bare vocalised
Reduplication In Pegon script, reduplication is represented with a numeral ٢ or a hyphen. If the word has a prefix, the duplicated base word is simply repeated after a hyphen. Otherwise, a ٢ indicates that the word is reduplicated. If the word has a suffix, the ٢ is placed between the base word and the suffix.
+ Sample Javanese words, showing reduplication. vocalized bare transliteration meaning tembung-tembung wordsanggota-anggota member who surungsurung encouragement
Sundanese Pégon The Sundanese language has a slightly different system in writing Pegon compared to its Javanese equivalent. While Javanese Pegon has extra letters for writing consonants Sundanese does not have such as and , Sundanese also has the vowel /ɨ/ (eu), Sundanese also does not glottalise final k, unlike Javanese.
Consonants
While Sundanese Pegon is usually written similarly to Javanese Pegon, in some manuscripts and writings, several characters differs, specifically and , where they are written with two vertical dots instead of three.
+ Kaganga Order + Hijaiyah Order
Vowels For word-initial vowels, the letter alif is used with the approriate diacritic mark, ain is only used if the word is an Arabic loan.
+Vowel syllables vowel wordinitial bare vocalised + vowel bare vocalised
Diphthongs or stand-alone vowels next to another vowel are written with or as placeholder consonants, depends on how its pronounced, this does not apply to duplicate vowels, they are written with a hamzah instead.
+ Sample Sundanese words, bare scriptPegonTransliterationMeaningLiteralActual cariyos carios story iyeu ieu this muwih muih to return seueur seueur many
While the letters wau and ra in Arabic are isolated letters, in Sundanese texts, these letters are often written connecting to the next letter, usually when followed by the letter ha .
Madurese Pèghu The Madurese language has a more complicated phonology than other Javanese languages. It includes the vowel /ɤ/ (â) and a wider range of glottal stops than Javanese or Sundanese. The Arabic script as adapted to Madurese, known as Pèghu, had some differences from other versions of Pegon, and is always written vocalized using diacritics.
Consonants Madurese has more consonants than its neighboring languages, including voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and voiced unaspirated, but with the exception of dh, aspirated consonants in Madurese Pèghu are represented by the same letters as their unaspirated counterparts.
Vowels Vowels at the beginning of a word are indicated by the letter alif or ain with the appropriate diacritic, and a follow-up letter , , or , if required. Usually, this follow-up letter is written with a zero-vowel diacritic (sukūn), to indicate that it is part of the first syllable, and not part of a new one.
+Word-initial vowels
+Vowels following the consonant ك
Gorontalo Pegon
Consonants Gorontalo, a language spoken on the north of Sulawesi has its own Pegon tradition. Gorontalo has a slightly different set of consonant sounds than the other users of Pegon script, namely prenasalized consonants, [mb], [nt], and [ngg], which are written as digraphs.Hula, I. R., Helingo, A., Jassin, S. N., & Sarif, S. (2022). Transcription of Pegon gorontalo Arabic orthography, Malay and Arabic standard: A contraceptive linguistic analysis. ʻAjamiy : Jurnal Bahasa Dan Sastra Arab, 11(2), 322. https://doi.org/10.31314/ajamiy.11.2.322-341.2022Sawal, S. N., Fitrah, Moh. A., & Rinaldy, A. (2025). The Effectiveness of Learning Arab Pegon Gorontalo Through the Kitab Dikili in Strengthening Islamic Cultural Values Among Students of Muhammadiyah Unggulan Islamic Senior High School, Gorontalo City. VIRAL (Virtual International Research and Academic Converence on Arabic Language), 3(1), 196–207. https://ejournal.iaingorontalo.ac.id/index.php/viral/article/view/3167
Vowels Vowel notation in Gorontalo is where their Pegon tradition diverges from the languages on the Java Island. There are three major differences. First, there is no distinguishing between "e-pepêt" (schwa) and "e-taling" (regular /e/ or /ɛ/ sound). Secondly, both "e" and "o" are written and indicated with "pepêt" (/) diacritics, where the placement (above or below) determines wheter it is [o] or [e] respectively. Thirdly, matres lectionis (the letters alif, waw, and ya in their role as vowel) are rarely used, only in specific contexts such as vowel length or writing of a loanword. In this regard, Gorontalo Pegon is similar to Buri Wolio (another traditional Arabic script, further south on Sulawesi Island)
+Vowels following the consonant ك
Comparison of Pegon and Jawi The orthographic rules of Jawi and Pegon differ, with Jawi spelling being much more standardised than Pegon. Pegon tends to write all vowel sounds of native words explicitly, either with full letters or diacritics, whereas Jawi spelling sometimes omits alif in certain positions where an would be pronounced, and other vowel sounds may not be written explicitly.
For those additional letters representing sounds not present in Arabic, some letters have the same appearance in both Jawi and Pegon, while others differ. Pegon also has two additional letters for sounds native to Javanese which are not present in Malay. Also the form of kaf used differs between the two varieties with Pegon using the Arabic form, while Jawi uses the Persian form.
+ Letter differences between Pegon and Jawi PegonJawi - -
Transliteration The United States Library of Congress published a romanization standard of Jawi and Pegon in 2012.The Library of Congress. (2012). ALA-LC Romanization Tables: Jawi-Pegon. Retrieved 9 April 2019.
Examples
Indonesian Explanation of Qalqalah in Indonesian, Pegon script, non-vocalizedExplanation: Qalqalah is the act of bouncing a letters' sound (which usually has a sound) as if it doesn't really stop, when stopping (while reciting the Qur'an). There are 5 letters, which are: Qaf - Ta - Ba - Jeem - Dal
Qalqalah is divided into two parts, which are: (1) Small Qalqalah, (2) Big Qalqalah
Sundanese John 3:16 in Sundanese, Pegon script, vocalizedFor God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Al-Baqarah 69 in Sundanese, Pegon script, non-vocalizedThen the Children of Israel said: "Pray to Your Lord for us so that He may tell us on what color the cow was." Then Prophet Moses answered: "Indeed Allah said: Verily, the cow must be yellow, a true yellow that shines like gold, so that everyone who sees it will be filled with joy, for that color is grand and clean."
Gorontalo