PHONOLOGICAL DESCRIPTION AND ORTHOGRAPHIC CHALLENGES IN DEVELOPING A LOLOAN MALAY ORTHOGRAPHY

Loloan Malay, a minority language spoken in Bali, lacks a standardized orthographic system, resulting in inconsistent spelling practices. This study provides a phonological description of Loloan Malay and examines orthographic challenges arising from phonological variation and language contact, with the aim of proposing a practical orthographic framework combining both phonemic and morphophonemic principles informed by community preferences. The preferences are based on elicited lexical data from twelve native speakers representing different age and gender groups, complemented by follow-up consultations through informal interviews with seven members of the community. Audio and video recordings were transcribed and phonemic analysis was conducted to distinguish phonemic contrasts from allophonic variation before mapping phonological patterns to graphemic representations following Seifart’s (2006) framework for orthography development. The findings indicate that phonological variation, particularly allophonic variation in the vowel system, creates challenges for consistent graphemic representation. For example, the high front lax vowel /ɪ/, an allophone of /i/, is variably represented, which results in ambiguity such as sambil ‘while’ and sambel ‘while’ or ‘chili’. The proposed framework addresses these ambiguities and prioritizes pronunciation transparency. This study contributes to efforts toward more consistent writing practices for Loloan Malay, with implications for literacy development and pedagogical applications.