Pegon as vernacular heritage literacy: a qualitative study in East Java Pesantren

This study examines the Pegon script as a vernacular writing system and heritage literacy practice in Islamic pesantren in East Java, Indonesia. Pegon – an adaptation of Arabic script used for Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese – has long been written as diagonal annotations alongside Arabic source texts and has supported the study of core Islamic disciplines since at least the seventeenth century. While prior research has approached Pegon historically, philologically, linguistically, and culturally, fewer studies have investigated how it is practiced and valued in everyday pesantren life. Drawing on a heritage literacy framework, we conducted a qualitative study using unstructured interviews with eleven participants, informal conversations, and ethnographically informed field observations with three participants across several pesantren. The findings show that Pegon functions as an interpretive and pedagogical scaffold for reading kitab kuning, enabling precise, word-by-word engagement with classical Arabic texts. At the same time, Pegon mediates Islamic learning through Javanese linguistic resources, transmitting local cultural knowledge, etiquette, and worldview. Pegon is sustained through intergenerational pedagogies and serves as a marker of pesantren identity and scholarly legitimacy.