By: Dr. Felicia Nuradi Utorodewo
On August 17, 2022, Badan Bahasa issued an electronic book entitled Ejaan yang Disempurnakan V, or in English, Perfected Spelling V (EYD 5). The book contains guidelines for Indonesian language users to use the ideal spelling and punctuation. These guidelines apply to written language because spelling and punctuation reflect spoken language as written language. We use intonation and body movements or kinesthetics to make our speech clear to our target audience. However, the intonation and gestures must be marked in writing if the discourse is written, and that marking is contained in EYD V.
A guideline is always dynamic. Guidelines, especially language guidelines, will undergo adjustments in line with language changes that occur. This means that periodically there will be changes to the guidelines. That explains why the latest issue is titled EYD V. Implicitly or covertly, the guidelines relating to Indonesian spelling and punctuation have undergone adjustments five times. Indonesian spelling adjustments have long existed since Old Malay’s development in the 13th century. However, the spelling guidelines related to the improved spelling guidelines were only created centuries later.
At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the Dutch Government felt the importance of perfecting the Malay spelling system into Latin letters. In 1901, Ch. A. van Ophuijsen became a researcher who established a new spelling system for the Malay language. The spelling system was published in his book Kitab Logat Melajoe: Glossary for The Spelling of The Malian Language With Latin Characters (1901). The popular term used as the name of the guideline is Ejaan van Ophuijsen. The first guideline was valid until Indonesian independence (1945). Since the Youth Pledge in 1928, the name of the Indonesian language has come to the fore. However, users and linguists needed to refine van Ophuijsen’s spelling further.
The interest in perfecting spelling rules surfaced in 1938 in Solo during the First Indonesian Language Congress. However, these guidelines only materialized on April 15, 1947, in a Decree by the Minister of Education and Culture. The 1947 spelling is better known as the Soewandi or the Republican Spelling. There were two significant changes. The first is writing the sound /u/ from two letters ‘oe’ to one letter ‘u’. The second uses the letter ‘k’ as a symbol for a glottal consonant sound. Initially, the glottal sound was denoted by a diacritical mark in the form of a single quotation mark (‘).
Soewandi’s spelling raises various reactions so that a desire arose to perfect it again. In the Second Indonesian Language Congress (1954), it was decided to refine Indonesian spelling again with the following framework, (1) spelling as much as possible describes one phoneme (the individual sounds that are used in spoken language) with one letter, (2) the determination of spelling should be carried out by a competent body, and (3) spelling should be practical but scientific. The spelling guide is known as the Renewal of Spelling (1957). However, these spelling guidelines were never implemented because new political developments affected the development of Indonesian spelling.
This new development was an agreement between the Republic of Indonesia and the Malay Land Alliance. Together these two countries produced a spelling concept named Melindo Spelling (Malay-Indonesian Spelling). However, this spelling did not materialize due to confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia.
In 1966, the Language and Literature Institute, part of the Ministry of Education and Culture, proposed a new concept to replace the Melindo spelling. Through many joint meetings with the Malaysian government, in the end, a new spelling guide was agreed upon in 1972. The spelling guide is the Enhanced Spelling Guide (PEYD), and the name of this guideline became the forerunner for the revised spelling guide.
Successively after that, changes to names, editions, and conventions were made following the development of the Indonesian language, as shown in the following table.
| Year | Rules | No | Edition |
| 1975 | Decree of the Minister of Education and Culture dated. August 27, 1975 No. 0196/U/1975 | Improved General Guidelines for Indonesian Spelling, and General Guidelines for the Formation of Terms | 1 |
| 1987 | Minister of Education and Culture Decree No. 0543a/U/1097 | Improved General Guidelines for Indonesian Spelling | 2 |
| 2009 | Minister of Education and Culture Regulation No. 46 of 2009 | Improved General Guidelines for Indonesian Spelling | 3 |
| 2015 | Minister of Education and Culture Regulation No. 50 yr 2015 | General Guidelines for Indonesian Spelling | 4 |
| 2022 | Decree of the Head of Indonesian Language Development and Development Agency No.0424/I/BS.00.01/2022 | Enhanced Indonesian Spelling Fifth Edition | 5 |
When reading the history and development of spelling guidelines that have been described, consider the date of the guideline’s update. Language users can analyze the differences or shortcomings of previous editions without analyzing the differences or shortcomings of previous editions. The current guide is a refinement of the previous edition. It is recommended that language users and observers always have the latest edition of the guidelines and focus on the most up-to-date guidelines. Practical needs do not require linguistic analysis, but it is sufficient to study the latest applicable regulations.
