The Ol Onal is an

alphabetic An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...

writing script of Bhumij language, spoken by Bhumij peoples. Ol Onal script was created between 1981 and 1992 by ''Ol Guru''

Mahendra Nath Sardar Mahendra is a Sanskrit compound word deriving from Maha (Highest position) and Indra Deva (the King of Gods) from Hindu mythology.{{Citation needed, date=April 2022 It has been used in compound royal styles. History and politics Royalty * M ...

. Ol Onal script is used to write Bhumij language in some parts of

West Bengal West Bengal (, Bengali: ''Poshchim Bongo'', , abbr. WB) is a state in the eastern portion of India. It is situated along the Bay of Bengal, along with a population of over 91 million inhabitants within an area of . West Bengal is the fourt ...

Jharkhand Jharkhand (; ; ) is a state in eastern India. The state shares its border with the states of West Bengal to the east, Chhattisgarh to the west, Uttar Pradesh to the northwest, Bihar to the north and Odisha to the south. It has an area of . It ...

Orissa Odisha (English: , ), formerly Orissa ( the official name until 2011), is an Indian state located in Eastern India. It is the 8th largest state by area, and the 11th largest by population. The state has the third largest population of Sch ...

, and

Assam Assam (; ) is a state in northeastern India, south of the eastern Himalayas along the Brahmaputra and Barak River valleys. Assam covers an area of . The state is bordered by Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh to the north; Nagaland and Manipur ...

History

The Ol Onal script was created in between 1981 and 1992 by Ol Guru Mahendra Nath Sardar for the Bhumij language.

Bhumij community had no written language and knowledge was transmitted orally from one generation to other. Later researchers started to use

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental syste ...

Bengali Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to: *something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia * Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region * Bengali language, the language they speak ** Bengali alphabet, the w ...

, and

Odia Odia, also spelled Oriya or Odiya, may refer to: * Odia people in Odisha, India * Odia language, an Indian language, belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family * Odia alphabet, a writing system used for the Odia languag ...

scripts to document the Bhumij language. However, Bhumijs did not have their own script. His invention of the Ol Onal script enriched the cultural identity of the tribal Bhumij community. He wrote many text books in the Ol Onal script.

Language

Bhumij is the language of the Munda subfamily of the

Austroasiatic languages The Austroasiatic languages , , are a large language family in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. These languages are scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China and are t ...

, related to Ho, Mundari and Santali, spoken mainly in the Indian states

Odisha Odisha (English: , ), formerly Orissa ( the official name until 2011), is an Indian state located in Eastern India. It is the 8th largest state by area, and the 11th largest by population. The state has the third largest population of ...

and

. It is spoken by around 100,000 people in India.

References

External links

The Ol Onal Alphabet at Omniglot

Proposal to encode the Ol Onal script
Alphabets Munda scripts Constructed scripts Writing systems Writing systems of Asia Bhumij language Bhumij {{austroasiatic-lang-stub

History

Language

See also

References

External links