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The Rejang script is an
abugida An abugida (; from Geʽez: , )sometimes also called alphasyllabary, neosyllabary, or pseudo-alphabetis a segmental Writing systems#Segmental writing system, writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit ...
of the
Brahmic family The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout South Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India and are used b ...
that is related to other scripts of the region, such as the
Batak Batak is a collective term used to identify a number of closely related Austronesian peoples, Austronesian ethnic groups predominantly found in North Sumatra, Indonesia, who speak Batak languages. The term is used to include the Karo people ( ...
and
Lontara script The Lontara script (), also known as the Bugis script, Bugis-Makassar script, or Urupu Sulapa’ Eppa’ "four-cornered letters", is one of Indonesia's traditional scripts developed in the South Sulawesi and West Sulawesi region. The script is ...
s. Rejang is also a member of the closely related group of Ulu scripts that include the script variants of South Sumatra, Bengkulu, Lembak, Lintang, Lebong, and Serawai. Other closely related scripts that are sometimes included in the Surat Ulu group include the Ogan, Kerinci, and Lampung scripts. 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 Ocean, Indian and Pacific Ocean, Pacific oceans. Comprising over List of islands of Indonesia, 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, ...
on the island of
Sumatra Sumatra () is one of the Sunda Islands of western Indonesia. It is the largest island that is fully within Indonesian territory, as well as the list of islands by area, sixth-largest island in the world at 482,286.55 km2 (182,812 mi. ...
in the southwest highlands, north
Bengkulu Bengkulu (), historically known as Bencoolen, is a province of Indonesia. It is located on the southwest coast of Sumatra. It was formed on 18 November 1968 by separating out the area of the historic Bencoolen Residency from the province of ...
Province, around Arga Makmur, Muaraaman,
Curup Curup ( Rejang: Cu'up) is the regency seat and also an administrative district of Rejang Lebong Regency, part of the Indonesian Province of Bengkulu on Sumatra island. The district (''kecamatan'') has an area of 5.21 km²,Badan Pusat Statistik, ...
, and Kepahiang, and also in the Rawas area of
South Sumatra South Sumatra () is a Provinces of Indonesia, province of Indonesia, located in the southeast of the island of Sumatra. The capital and largest city of the province is the city of Palembang. The province borders the provinces of Jambi to the north ...
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

As in other Brahmic scripts, Rejang consonants have an
inherent vowel An inherent vowel is part of an abugida (or alphasyllabary) script. It is a vowel sound which is used with each unmarked or basic consonant symbol. There are many known abugida scripts, including most of the Brahmic scripts and Kharosthi, the c ...
or , so, for example, the consonant is pronounced ''ka'' or ''kə''. Other vowels are represented by diacritics attached to a base letter. Vowel diacritics may also be attached to the base letter ''a'', which acts as a null consonant. Consonants at the end of a syllable are also represented by diacritics. 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 vir ...
is a "killer stroke" that suppresses any consonant's inherent vowel, leaving an isolated consonant, so, for example, , ''ka'' plus a virama , is pronounced ''k''.


Unicode

Rejang script was added to the
Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
Standard in March, 2008 with the release of version 5.1. The Unicode block for Rejang is U+A930 –U+A95F:


See also

* Rencong script


References


External links

* https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21116-surat-ulu.pdf {{DEFAULTSORT:Rejang Script Brahmic scripts Indonesian scripts