Koewatir

The word koewatir derives from the Arabic root khawf, meaning fear or anxiety, which entered Malay through the absorption of Arab-Islamic vocabulary. Under the Van Ophuijsen orthography officially adopted in the Dutch East Indies in 1901, the vowel phoneme /u/ was written as 'oe', giving rise to the spelling koewatir. Following the introduction of the Soewandi spelling system in 1947, the word was respelled as kuwatir, replacing 'oe' with 'u', though the initial consonant cluster was not yet standardized to 'kh'. It was not until the Perfected Spelling System (EYD) of 1972 that the word was officially standardized as khawatir, in accordance with the rules governing Arabic loanword absorption. The form koewatir was widely used in personal correspondence, newspapers, and Malay-Indonesian literary works during the colonial and early independence periods, reflecting the formal written register of that era.