Republican Spelling System

The Republican Spelling System (in Indonesian: Ejaan Republik, when written in the current spelling system, or edjaan Republik, when written in this spelling system) was the orthography used for Indonesian from 17 March 1947 until 1972. This spelling was also called Soewandi Spelling (in Indonesian: edjaan Soewandi) after the Indonesian Minister of Education (Raden Soewandi) at the time.

This spelling replaced the earlier spelling system, the Van Ophuijsen Spelling System, which was in force from 1901. While it simplified the van Ophuijsen system somewhat (notably with the introduction of the letter "u" and the removal of diacritics), it retained other aspects of the old system, such as the Dutch-influenced digraphs "ch", "dj" and "tj".

The differences between the Van Ophuijsen Spelling System and this system are:

• The vowel [u], which in the Van Ophuijsen Spelling System was written as oe, became u, for example goeroe became guru.
• The glottal stop [ʔ], which was written as ' in the van Ophuijsen Spelling System, was written as k in Republican Spelling, for example tak (formerly ta'), pak (formerly pa'), maklum (formerly ma'lum) and rakyat (formerly ra'jat).
• reduplicated words could be written using the numeral 2, for example ubur2, ber-main2 and ke-barat2-an.
• Both the prefix 'di-' and the preposition 'di' were written without a space after the preposition or prefix. Thus, the preposition di (for example dirumah and disawah) was not differentiated from the prefix di- (for example dibeli and dimakan).

Soewandi Spelling was in force from 1947 until 1972, when it was replaced by the Perfected Spelling System (also called EYD or Ejaan yang Disempurnakan) when Mashuri Saleh became Minister of Education and Culture. On 23 May 1972, Mashuri legalized the usage of the Perfected Spelling System, replacing Soewandi Spelling. This event was marked by changing the road sign at the front of his office from Djl Tjilatjap to Jl. Cilacap.