Malay Jawi to Rumi Converter

The Malay Jawi to Rumi Converter transliterates Bahasa Melayu between its two scripts: Jawi, the Arabic-based script, and Rumi, the Latin alphabet. It uses the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka Jawi letter set, including the letters created specifically for Malay sounds, so the output is faithful to how Malay is actually written in Jawi.

How it works

The converter scans your text and replaces graphemes using a Jawi-Rumi mapping table. For Rumi to Jawi, multi-letter sequences are matched first so digraphs convert correctly:

• ng becomes ڠ (nga)
• ny becomes ڽ (nya)
• sy becomes ش, kh becomes خ, gh becomes غ

Single letters then map to their Jawi consonants and vowel-carriers — for example p to ڤ (pa), c to چ (ca), g to ݢ (ga), and v to ۏ (va). Whitespace and punctuation pass through untouched, and the text direction flips to right-to-left for Jawi output.

For Jawi to Rumi, each Jawi glyph maps back to its Rumi reading. Because Jawi is partly vowel-defective — short vowels are frequently omitted — the reverse direction is a best-effort phonetic transliteration rather than guaranteed standard spelling.

Example

The Rumi phrase selamat datang transliterates to the Jawi form سلامت داتڠ, where the final ng becomes the single letter ڠ.

The six Malay-specific Jawi letters

Standard Arabic has 28 letters; Jawi for Malay adds six more to represent sounds absent from Arabic:

These six letters are official additions ratified by Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP), Malaysia’s national language authority. Without them, Malay words containing those consonants cannot be written accurately in Jawi. This tool includes all six so conversions of authentic Malay vocabulary are faithful to DBP conventions.

Where Jawi is used today

Despite Rumi being the everyday standard since the mid-20th century, Jawi remains active in specific contexts:

• Official documents in Malaysia and Brunei. Some forms, banknotes (the word “ringgit” appears in Jawi on Malaysian currency), and road signs in certain states appear in both scripts.
• Islamic and religious education. The Quran is in Arabic, and Jawi is used in Islamic studies curricula in Malaysian and Bruneian schools.
• Royal and ceremonial writing. Official correspondence from royal households traditionally uses Jawi, and state crests sometimes feature Jawi text.
• Kelantan and Terengganu. These states on the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia have stronger Jawi usage in signage and local government documents than other states.

Limitations to be aware of

Vowel defectiveness. Standard Jawi writing omits short vowels (a, i, u), meaning the same Jawi string can sometimes be read as different Malay words depending on context. The tool uses a consistent phonetic mapping rather than word-lookup, so the Jawi-to-Rumi direction gives a phonetic reading, not necessarily the dictionary-standard spelling of every word.

Proper nouns. Names of places, people, and organizations often have established conventional Jawi spellings that differ from a systematic transliteration. For formal documents involving proper nouns, check an authoritative Malay dictionary or the DBP Kamus Dewan.

• For formal documents, verify the Jawi spelling of proper nouns against an authoritative dictionary, since conventional spellings can differ from a letter-by-letter transliteration.
• The right-to-left direction is applied automatically so Jawi renders naturally.