The Rejang alphabet, is an
abugida
An abugida (, from Ge'ez language, Ge'ez: ), sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental Writing systems#Segmental writing system, writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units; ...
of the
Brahmic family, and is related to other scripts of the region, like
Batak,
Lontara, and others. Rejang is a member of the closely related group of
Surat Ulu scripts that include the script variants of South Sumatra, Bengkulu, Lembak, Lintang, Lebong, and Serawai. Other scripts that are closely related, and sometimes included in the Surat Ulu group, are
South Sumatra,
Kerinci and
Lampung. The script was in use prior to the introduction of Islam to the Rejang area; the earliest attested document appears to date from the mid-18th century CE. The Rejang script is sometimes also known as the KaGaNga script following the first three letters of the alphabet. The term KaGaNga was never used by the users of the script community, but it was coined by the British anthropologist Mervyn A. Jaspan (1926–1975) in his book ''Folk literature of South Sumatra. Redjang Ka-Ga-Nga texts.'' Canberra, The Australian National University 1964.
The script was used to write texts in Malay and
Rejang, which is now spoken by about 200,000 people living in
Indonesia
Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...
on the island of
Sumatra in the southwest highlands, north
Bengkulu Province, around
Arga Makmur
Arga Makmur is a town, district and the seat of North Bengkulu Regency
North Bengkulu is a regency ( id, kabupaten) of Bengkulu Province, Indonesia
Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceani ...
,
Muaraaman,
Curup
Curup is a town and district of Rejang Lebong Regency, part of Bengkulu Province of Indonesia. It is also the administrative capital of the regency. Curup is the second-largest town in the province of Bengkulu. Curup District has an area of 6.2 ...
, and
Kepahiang, and also in the Rawas area of
South Sumatra Province, near
Muara Kulam. There are five major dialects of Rejang: Lebong, Musi, Kebanagung, Pesisir (all in Bengkulu Province), and Rawas (in South Sumatra Province). Most of its users live in fairly remote rural areas, of whom slightly less than half are literate.
The traditional Rejang corpus consists chiefly of ritual texts, medical incantations, and poetry.
Letters
Letters of the script can be found in the inscription below:
[Everson, Michael. (2006)]
''Proposal for encoding the Rejang script in the BMP of the UCS''.
/ref>
Letters with IPA
The script's diacritics are attached here to the base letter ''a'' () to disambiguate similar ones if the base letter isn't used, like in the case with , , , and . Exception for the virama
Virama ( ्) is a Sanskrit phonological concept to suppress the inherent vowel that otherwise occurs with every consonant letter, commonly used as a generic term for a codepoint in Unicode, representing either
# halanta, hasanta or explicit virā ...
, in which its base letter is ''ka'' ().
See also
* Rencong script
References
External links
* https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21116-surat-ulu.pdf
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rejang Script
Brahmic scripts
Indonesian scripts