The modern Malay and Indonesian alphabet (Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore: Tulisan Rumi, lit.
As the Malay-speaking countries were divided between two colonial administrations (the Dutch and the British), two major different spelling orthographies were developed in the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya respectively, influenced by the orthographies of their respective colonial tongues.
Although the representations of speech sounds are now largely identical in Indonesian and other neighbouring Malay varieties, a number of minor spelling differences remain.
F and Z occur in loanwords from Arabic (e. g. fatah 'conquest, opening', zaman 'era, period, time') and from European languages (e. g. faktor 'factor', zoologi 'zoology').
* Many vowels are pronounced (and were formerly spelt) differently in Peninsular Malaysia and Sumatra (where Malay is native): tujuh is pronounced (and was spelt) tujoh, rambut as rambot, kain as kaen, pilih as pileh, etc., [e] and [o] are also allophones of /i/ and /u/ in closed final syllables in peninsular Malaysian and Sumatran.