Pegon

Pegon, or aksara Pegon, is an adapted Arabic script used to write several languages in Indonesia, most notably Javanese and Madurese. It belongs to the Jawi family of scripts and was developed to allow local languages to be written with Arabic-derived characters while accommodating sounds not present in Arabic through additional letters and diacritics.

Pegon originated with the spread of Islam in Java and surrounding islands and was used from the medieval period onward in religious schools known as pesantren, as well as in manuscripts, poetry, and Qur’anic commentaries. Its use grew in the colonial era and into the 19th and early 20th centuries, though it remained one of several writing systems for Javanese and Madurese.

In form, Pegon is written from right to left like Arabic. It uses the base Arabic letter shapes with extra letters and diacritical marks to represent local phonemes, as well as vowel notation for short and long vowels. Because there has never been a single nationally enforced orthography for Pegon, regional varieties and styles exist, and modern authors sometimes employ transliteration and mixed scripts.

Today Pegon survives mainly in religious education, calligraphy, and cultural heritage projects. Latin-based orthographies are dominant for everyday use, but Pegon continues to appear in pesantren curricula, some scholarly publications, and traditional literary works. Efforts to standardize its orthography and to promote digital fonts and encoding have continued in academic and cultural contexts.