Reading and Writing in Southeast Asian Languages

Traditionally, research on reading and writing has focused on a limited number of European languages, in particular English. More recently, there has been a growing interest in conducting research on more diverse languages and scripts. There is a dearth of research conducted on the languages of Southeast Asia. By including these languages and scripts, we can build more comprehensive and representative universal models of reading and writing. In this paper, the characteristics of the languages and writing systems of Southeast Asia will be briefly reviewed. Subsequently, some research that has been conducted on Thai and Malaysian/Indonesian will be focused on. Finally, some suggestions for future research will be made.