The Dunging script or Iban script is a semi-alphabetic script used to write the

Iban language The Iban language () is spoken by the Iban, one of the Dayak ethnic groups who live in Brunei, the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan and in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. It belongs to the Malayic subgroup, a Malayo-Polynesian branch ...

Sarawak Sarawak ( , ) is a States and federal territories of Malaysia, state of Malaysia. It is the largest among the 13 states, with an area almost equal to that of Peninsular Malaysia. Sarawak is located in East Malaysia in northwest Borneo, and is ...

. It was invented in 1947 by Dunging Anak Gunggu (1904–1985), who revised the initial 77 glyphs to the current 59 glyphs in 1962. It has not been used widely. In 2012, Dr. Bromeley Philip of

Universiti Teknologi MARA The MARA Technological University ( Malay: ''Universiti Teknologi MARA''; Jawi: اونيۏرسيتي تيكنولوڬي مارا; abbr. UiTM) is a public university in Malaysia, based primarily in Shah Alam, Selangor. It was established to ...

began to promote the script again.

History

Dunging Anak Gunggu did not attend any formal education before inventing the Dunging script. He taught himself on reading and writing in writing in Latin alphabet and some

Jawi script Jawi (; ; ; ) is a writing system used for writing several languages of Southeast Asia, such as Acehnese, Banjarese, Betawi, Magindanao, Malay, Mëranaw, Minangkabau, Tausūg, Ternate and many other languages in Southeast Asia. Jawi ...

. Dunging succeeded in teaching the script to his family members and a few friends. Later, Bagat Nunui, the former chief of Nanga Ulai longhouse (same longhouse as Dunging) decided to preserved the script. However, there was little interest from other members of his community. He was invited to teach the script at a school in Betong, but with little success. Since then, unsuccessful attempts were made to revive this script. In 2010, extending Dunging's work, Dr. Bromeley Philip of

(UiTM) Sarawak developed computer fonts for the Iban alphabet, called LaserIban. His aim is to help preserve the Iban alphabet in digital form in the modern world. The LaserIban is available for Windows and Macintosh computers and is completely cross-platform compatible. LaserIban however, is a legacy typeface encoded onto the Latin block of Unicode, thereby limiting its range of use in computers.

References

Writing systems of Asia Sarawak Ibanic languages 1947 establishments in Sarawak Syllabary writing systems Writing systems introduced in 1947 {{writingsystem-stub