How to Pronounce JKT48 Members Name

It’s common that overseas fans finding it hard to pronounce the girls name since Indonesian name is not that very known internationally added with the fact that Indonesia doesn’t have any letter to represent schwa [ə] while phonetically, [ə] is often used.

I don’t really get the reason for the exclusion of the character [ə] from Indonesian alphabet, but I don’t want to delve too much on political matters as it doesn’t have anything to do with JKT48.

For an example case, let’s take a look at Dhike’s nickname.  Dhike’s name can somewhat mispronounced by international fans as “Dike” [/d//ɪ//k//e/] with hard e (like e in Red ) . Although this doesn’t matter really much, I would like to explain something about the letter E in Indonesian which could become a little bit confusing.

There’s two common variant of E in Indonesian (please correct me if I’m wrong), one is the close-mid front vowel like the e in Red and one is the mid-central vowel as the u in Blur .

Phonetically, “Dhike”‘s nickname could be pronounced as Dikə [/d//ɪ//k//ə/] . Indonesian alphabet doesn’t recognize the Latin letter for schwa [ə], thus the confusing application for the letter E in conversation by foreigners.

And to make matters more confusing, Dhike’s other nickname, Ikey , use the hard e , “Ikey” [/ɪ//k//e//ɪ/] and not pronounced with a schwa [ə] .

As for Japanese fans, the JKT48 official website write their name just like how they were represented by the words and not by how their name pronounced. For an example, “Mike” in English is written as “マイク” and not “ミケ” to adjust Japanese to the pronunciation. So yeah, the official website itself sparks confusions among overseas Japanese speaking fans. And although I don’t mind with this confusions, We, in JKT48Stuff, thinks it is best to unofficially let people know how to pronounce the girls name. So without further ado, here’s how to pronounce the girls name using an audio file :