the jarai orthography

The Jarai alphabet was developed in Vietnam, and it is based on the Roman script as it was adapted for use in writing Vietnamese. However, the Jarai alphabet is not identical to the Vietnamese alphabet. Certain innovations have beeen made to represent phonemes not present in Vietnamese. Furthermore, because Jarai does not have phonemic tone, some of the diacritics used in Vietnamese to represent tone are used in Jarai to represent vowel height and vowel length.

There is no recognized standard for the Jarai alphabet. For example, Pierre-Bernard Lafont's Lexique Francais-Jarai-Vietnamien (Parler de la Province de Plei Ku) uses certain letters and modifications not found in the Jarai New Testament or hymnal, or in other lexical sources.

The Jarai orthography has the advantage of being easy to learn, and probably more than a thousand Jarai men in Cambodia have learned to read and write their language without the help of litercy programs or formal Jarai teaching. However, the alphabet would require certain modifications to accurately represent all phonemes and phonemic distinctions. It might be necessary for the Jarai in Cambodia to have an orthography based on the Khmer orthography.