'Personil' Misconception: Why This Misspelling Sticks So Stubbornly

The variant 'personil' emerged through a process of erroneous morphological analogy. Indonesian speakers tend to associate the word's ending with the suffix '-il', which feels more familiar through common vocabulary such as 'fosil' (fossil), 'pensil' (pencil), or 'tekstil' (textile). The '-il' ending sounds more natural and is easier to pronounce within the Indonesian phonological system, leading speakers to unconsciously substitute '-el' with '-il'. This phenomenon is known as overgeneralization — the excessive application of a familiar pattern to a word that actually follows a different rule.

The word 'personel' is borrowed from English *personnel*, which itself derives from French *personnel* and Latin *personalis*, meaning 'relating to a person' (*person*). In its modern usage, *personnel* refers to a body of people employed within an organization, institution, or armed forces. Its adoption into Indonesian follows standard phonetic borrowing rules, wherein the vowel cluster '-el' is retained in accordance with the original pronunciation, yielding the standard form 'personel'.

The spelling 'personil' has been pervasive in official documents of the Indonesian military, police, and government bureaucracy since the New Order era. Its repeated use within institutional contexts reinforced the perception that 'personil' was the correct form, even among professionals. This gave rise to a form of social naturalization, where a normatively incorrect variant came to feel more 'official' and 'formal' to the general public. To this day, 'personil' remains dominant in mass media, institutional notice boards, and formal conversation, reflecting the powerful influence of collective habit on linguistic perception.