tjabang

Tjabang is a term that appears in historical Malay and Indonesian orthography as an older spelling of the modern word cabang, meaning branch or offshoot. It is not a separate lexical item with a distinct meaning; rather, it reflects a historical spelling of a common word used to denote a branch of a tree, a branch office, or a subdivision within an organization or geography.

Under Dutch-era spelling reforms, the digraph tj was used to represent the sound now written as c in modern Indonesian. Accordingly, tjabang corresponds to cabang. The spelling has largely fallen out of use since spelling reforms such as Ejaan Yang Disempurnakan (EYD) in the 1970s and its later updates, which standardized cabang as the modern form.

In contemporary Indonesian and Malay texts, cabang is used, while tjabang may be found only in historical documents, old dictionaries, or in discussions of orthographic history. The term is of interest primarily to linguists and historians studying language reform and colonial-era transcription practices.