Investigating the spelling pattern that can potentially propagate Jawi among speakers of Malay

The Arabic script of Malay (henceforth, Jawi) is now regarded as a marginalised script despite Malay being a synchronic digraphic language, a language with two different scripts existing concurrently. The complexity of the current Jawi spelling system has been identified as the reason why speakers of Malay avoid using Jawi when they should ideally be biscriptals. The current Jawi spelling system comes in various spelling patterns that are inconsistently used. Hence, this study was conducted to systematically investigate the spelling pattern that can potentially propagate Jawi among speakers of Malay. Three experiments were conducted with 30 (20 male, 10 female) participants who were native speakers of Malay (Mean age: 29.22 years). The experiments were designed to identify which spelling pattern can be read most accurately and the fastest when audio prompts (Experiment 1) and visual prompts (Experiments 2 and 3) were presented to participants. All participants read disyllabic monomorphemic words that were displayed to them. E-Prime was used to present the stimuli and record all responses (in/correct responses and reaction time) from the participants. Results show that the spelling pattern with vowel letters in both syllables and the spelling pattern with vowel diacritics scored the highest in terms of correct responses; however, the spelling pattern with vowel diacritics was read with the fastest reaction time. This suggests that the Jawi spelling pattern with vowel diacritics has the potential to propagate Jawi among speakers of the Malay language so that Jawi will no longer be a marginalised script.