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Abstract

Using a comparative historical-documentary approach and a purposive lexical sample, this article compares the transition from Arabic-based writing to Latin-script orthographies in Malay-Indonesian and Turkish. It argues that ``alphabet reform'' does not adequately describe the two histories unless the component processes of change are distinguished. In Malay-Indonesian, Roman writing circulated before the twentieth century, was standardized under colonial rule in 1901, gained institutional functions alongside Jawi, and was revised after independence in 1947 and 1972. In Turkey, decades of debate preceded the concentrated, state-led replacement of Ottoman writing in 1928. To capture these different trajectories, the comparison distinguishes Latin-script standardization, the displacement of an earlier script from major public domains, and orthographic reform within an established Latin script. Selected Arabic-derived vocabulary adds a linguistic dimension: Indonesian subuh, sabar, and waktu, and Turkish kitap, sabır, and vakit illustrate cases in which the Latin spellings represent recipient-language forms already shaped by local phonology, rather than mechanically transliterating Jawi or Ottoman graphemes. The article links these two dimensions of Latinization–sequence and representation–to explain how similar orthographic outcomes emerged from different institutional histories while encoding different locally established lexical forms.

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