Rejang alphabet

The script was used to write texts in Malay and Rejang, which is now spoken by about 200,000 people living in Indonesia on the island of Sumatra in the southwest highlands, north Bengkulu Province, around Arga Makmur, Muaraaman, Curup, and Kepahiang, and also in the Rawas area of South Sumatra 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 or , so, for example, the consonant ⟨ꤰ⟩ 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 ⟨ꥆ⟩ a, which acts as a null consonant.

Consonants at the end of a syllable are also represented by diacritics. The virama is a "killer stroke" that suppresses any consonant's inherent vowel, leaving an isolated consonant, so, for example, ⟨ꤰ⟩, ka plus a virama ⟨꥓⟩, ⟨ꤰ꥓⟩ is pronounced k.