The Hanifi Rohingya script is a unified script for the

Rohingya language Rohingya (; Hanifi Rohingya: , ,, ) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Rohingya people living in Rakhine State, Myanmar and Chittagong Division of Bangladesh. It is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Bengali–Assamese br ...

. Rohingya today is written in three scripts, Hanifi, Arabic (Rohingya Fonna), and Latin (Rohingyalish). The Rohingya language was first written in the 19th century with a version of the

Perso-Arabic script The Persian alphabet (), also known as the Perso-Arabic script, is the right-to-left script, right-to-left alphabet used for the Persian language. It is a variation of the Arabic script with four additional letters: (the sounds 'g', 'zh', ' ...

. In 1975, an orthographic

Arabic script The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic (Arabic alphabet) and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world (after the Latin script), the second-most widel ...

was developed and approved by the community leaders, based on the

Urdu alphabet The Urdu alphabet () is the right-to-left alphabet used for writing Urdu. It is a modification of the Persian alphabet, which itself is derived from the Arabic script. It has co-official status in the republics of Pakistan, India and South Afri ...

but with unique innovations to make the script suitable to Rohingya. In the 1980s, Mohammad Hanif and his colleagues created a suitable phonetic script based on the Arabic alphabet; it has been compared to the N’ko script. This script, unlike the Arabic script, is alphabetical, meaning that all vowels are independent letters, as opposed to

diacritics A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

as is the case in Arabic. However, vowels cannot stand on their own and always need to be connected to a consonant similar to

. Therefore, diphthongs cannot be written as vowel-vowel combination even though typographically this is possible. Tone markers are shown as diacritics in Hanifi script. It is written from right to left, following the direction of the Arabic script.

Characters

The Rohingya script has 28 consonant letters and 10 vowel letters. The script has 10 vowel letters. The script has three tone markers that are shown as diacritics above the vowel letters. The tone markers indicate high, low or falling tones.

Letters and their pronunciations and their equivalents

Consonants

Vowels and tone markers

Numbers

Mohammad Hanif and his colleagues also created a set of numerals for the Rohingya language, The numbers are based on the Hindu–Arabic numerals but with some modifications.

Unicode

The Hanifi Rohingya script was added to the

Unicode Standard Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 cha ...

in June 2018 with the release of version 11.0. Proposals to include it in Unicode were written by linguist Anshuman Pandey. The Unicode block for Hanifi Rohingya is U+10D00–U+10D3F and contains 50 characters:

Fonts

Google's Noto Sans has developed a Rohingya script font called ''Noto Sans Hanifi Rohingya'', available a
GitHub

Rohingya keyboard

virtual keyboard A virtual keyboard is a software component that allows the Input device, input of characters without the need for physical keys. Interaction with a virtual Computer keyboard, keyboard happens mostly via a touchscreen interface, but can also take p ...

was developed by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

for the Rohingya language in 2019 and allows users to type in the Rohingya script. Ahkter Husin, a Rohingya software developer developed a keyboard for

Android phone This is a list of devices that run on Android, an open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design docum ...

s which is available on

Google Play Store Google Play, also known as the Google Play Store, Play Store, or sometimes the Android Store (and was formerly Android Market), is a digital distribution service operated and developed by Google. It serves as the official app store for certifie ...

. Users can download
here
Ahkter Husin and Kyaw Zay Ya Lin Tun developed a keyboard app for

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

which can be foun
here
The Rohingya

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

keyboard layout can be foun
here

Sample text

The following is a sample text in Rohingya of Article 1 of the

Universal Declaration of Human Rights The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is an international document adopted by the United Nations General Assembly that enshrines the Human rights, rights and freedoms of all human beings. Drafted by a UN Drafting of the Universal D ...

with English, contrasted with versions of the text in Bengali and Assamese.

References

External links

* Tri-orthographic dictionary applicatio
Google Playstore

Rohingya Language Council
{{list of writing systems Rohingya language Alphabets Writing systems of Asia Writing systems introduced in 1980 Arabic script Right-to-left writing systems