Cham letter ma

ꨠ is the Cham letter ma, with an inherent vowel. Akhar Thrah is the traditional Cham script: each consonant carries a built-in vowel, and vowel signs alter it. Those signs may sit before, after, above, or below the consonant; the rest of the syllable completes the reading.

The Đông Yên Châu stone inscription, dated to the fourth century, is described as the earliest surviving writing in an Austronesian language; another inscribed stone from Champa records a royal donation in Sanskrit. Later palm-leaf and paper manuscripts carried religious study, history, and literature.

Why do Cham spellings vary by community?

The traditional Akhar Thrah script descends from Brahmi, an ancient Indian script, through its Pallava-Grantha branch. It is historically related to Khmer and Thai scripts and has also been compared especially closely with Balinese. These are script connections; their letters are not interchangeable.

Arabic writing entered Cham communities as early as the eleventh century. Some Western Cham communities write in Jawi, an Arabic-based script; Imam San communities use the Ka-Kha script. These community traditions make Cham orthography varied, so the script context matters when reading unfamiliar text.