Penilaian Ke Atas Kerumitan Kognitif Dalam Proses Membaca Jawi

The Malaysian government has taken a lot of actions to address the lack of usage of the Arabic alphabet for writing the Malay language (i.e., Jawi), and make it popular among the people at all levels. The Information, Communication and Culture Ministry of Malaysia even plan joint programmes with the Education Ministry to popularise the script by promoting it in the media and by increasing the teaching of the script in schools. Yet, despite million-ringgit efforts to revive the Jawi script, the script continues to be marginalised by the population. While it is important to ensure that the Jawi script continues to live, it will be meaningless if the population merely sees the script as a national heritage that is only used by the “more conservative” Malays in religious discourse. It is therefore crucial for us to understand the root cause of why Jawi continues to be marginalised by the majority of Malaysians. Without addressing this issue, millionringgit efforts to revive the script will fall through. One way to do this is to assess the cognitive complexity of Jawi, especially in reading the script. Hence, this paper discusses the cognitive complexity of the Jawi script from the psycholinguistic perspective. It systematically compares Jawi with Rumi, the Roman alphabet for writing the Malay language, to explain the continuous resistance, especially among the Malays, to learning and using the script.