What are Jawi and Rumi?

Rumi is the Latin-alphabet script used for everyday Malay. Jawi is the older Arabic-based script, still used in religious, royal, and cultural contexts in Malaysia and Brunei.

Which Malay-specific letters are supported?

The six augmented Jawi letters for Malay sounds are included: ca چ, nga ڠ, pa ڤ, ga ݢ, nya ڽ, and va ۏ, following the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka letter set.

Why is the result a transliteration, not perfect spelling?

Jawi is partly vowel-defective: short vowels are often not written, and some words have conventional spellings. The tool produces a consistent phonetic transliteration, which may differ from the official spelling of some words.

How are digraphs handled?

Multi-letter Rumi sequences like ng, ny, sy, kh, and gh are matched before single letters, so ng becomes ڠ rather than two separate letters.

No. The conversion runs entirely in your browser with no network calls, so your text stays private.

Malay Jawi to Rumi Converter

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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.

Notes

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.