[1] Historically, Indonesia and Malaysia—the two largest Malay-speaking countries, in that order—were divided between two colonial administrations, under the Dutch and British empires respectively.
Thus, the development of spelling systems for Rumi script were greatly influenced by the orthographies of their respective colonial tongues.
Shortly after the end of Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation in 1966, a common spelling system became among the first items on the agenda of a détente between the two countries.
[3] Although the representations of speech sounds are now largely identical in the Indonesian and Malaysian varieties, a number of minor spelling differences remain.
The first known attempt to use the Latin script or 'Rumi' for writing Malay words was by Duarte Barbosa in 1518 in Melaka, shortly after its conquest by the Portuguese in 1511.
[5][6] This was subsequently followed by many other European traders, adventurers, explorers and scholars who invented their own Rumi spelling systems.
Among notable Rumi spelling systems that existed before the 20th century were the orthographies of Cornelis de Houtman (1595),[7][8] Davidis Haex (1631),[9] Thomas Bowrey (1701),[10][11] J.Howison (1800),[12] William Marsden (1812),[13][14] Claudius Thomsen (1820),[15] John Crawfurd (1848),[16] Straits Settlements (1878),[17] Frank Swettenham (1881),[18] and William Edward Maxwell (1882).
The innovative Congress System gained widespread currency through published works but remained impractical for the use of the masses.
As a result, it was common during this era to find several spelling systems concurrently used in printed media and individual writings.
[23] In 1959, the Federation of Malaya and Indonesia signed a cultural agreement, which included the implementation of a common spelling system.
Following the end of Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation in 1966, a common spelling system became among the first items on the agenda of a detente between the two countries.
Language experts from both countries began to work on formulating a new system that was practical and above all accepted by the two parties concerned.
The Malay language shows a higher frequency of /ə/ compared to /e/, thus the Za'aba style was not economical in terms of the time taken for writing, quite apart from the fact that the text was full of diacritics.
However, facilitation in reading and mastering the language was the overriding factor in discarding it altogether as a shorthand symbol for reduplication.
[35] The old spelling systems in Malaysia and Indonesia did not recognise the existence of consonant clusters at the word-initial and word-final positions.
They were spelt, based on the established rule of Malay phonology that the syllable structure consists of only a single consonant as its onset and its coda.
[37] With its flexibility rule, the new spelling system has admitted clusters in the initial and final positions of the word.
However, those words which have existed for a long time in the Malay language with one or two components decapitated have been allowed to remain, so as not to cause too much destandardisation.
Among those which did not undergo a change in form by having their clusters reinstated are the Malaysian examples of komunis ('communist'), rekod ('record'), moden ('modern').
This has greatly facilitated the work of the various terminology committees of the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, already mentioned, in assimilating loanwords from other languages.