Rohingya Alphabet (Hanifi Script)

Hanifi Rohingya is the script made for the Rohingya language. It is named after Maulana Mohammed Hanif, who guided the Rohingya Language Committee in developing it in the 1980s; its letter shapes draw mainly on Arabic. Like Arabic it is written right to left and its letters join one another along a baseline, so a word is one connected stroke and each letter changes shape a little depending on its neighbours.

Unlike Arabic, Hanifi Rohingya is a full alphabet: every vowel is written. The letters run in this order: 𐴀 a, 𐴁 ba, 𐴂 pa, 𐴃 ta, 𐴄 tta, 𐴅 ja, 𐴆 ca, 𐴇 ha, 𐴈 kha, 𐴉 fa, 𐴊 da, 𐴋 dda, 𐴌 ra, 𐴍 rra, 𐴎 za, 𐴏 sa, 𐴐 sha, 𐴑 ka, 𐴒 ga, 𐴓 la, 𐴔 ma, 𐴕 na, 𐴖 wa, 𐴗 kinna wa, 𐴘 ya, 𐴙 kinna ya, 𐴚 nga and 𐴛 nya. Tta, dda and rra are retroflex sounds, made with the tongue curled back, that Rohingya shares with Bengali and Chittagonian; 𐴗 and 𐴙 are second forms of wa and ya.

CLDR, the Unicode project's language data, lists 39 characters for Rohingya: those 28 letters, five vowels, two marks, three tone signs and one gemination sign, all on this page. The Unicode block also has a letter 𐴜 va that CLDR does not list for the language.

Rohingya vowels, marks and tone signs

The five vowels 𐴝 a, 𐴞 i, 𐴟 u, 𐴠 e and 𐴡 o are letter-like vowel signs, written after the consonant they follow, so a syllable like ba is 𐴁 then 𐴝. 𐴢 sakin takes its name from the Arabic sukun, the sign for a consonant with no vowel after it, and 𐴣 na khonna marks nasalization after a vowel sign.

Rohingya distinguishes words by pitch and vowel length, and three tone signs record it: 𐴤 harbahay, 𐴥 tahala and 𐴦 tana; 𐴧 tassi marks gemination. They are combining characters: copied alone they sit over a dotted circle, and they attach to whatever letter comes right before them, so paste the letter first and the sign after it. The language's own name, Ruáingga, is written 𐴌𐴟𐴇𐴥𐴝𐴚𐴒𐴙𐴝 with tahala over 𐴇.

Rohingya numbers and punctuation ، ؟

The script has its own digits: 𐴰 𐴱 𐴲 𐴳 𐴴 𐴵 𐴶 𐴷 𐴸 𐴹 are 0 to 9. As with Arabic numerals, a number runs left to right inside right-to-left text, so 2018 is 𐴲𐴰𐴱𐴸, with 𐴲 first.

For punctuation Rohingya uses the Arabic marks, and Unicode's data lists them officially as shared with Hanifi Rohingya: the comma ،, the semicolon ؛, the reversed question mark ؟ and the Arabic full stop ۔, a short dash-like stroke. The ـ tatweel stretches the join between two letters, used to lengthen words in titles and headings.

How to type Rohingya: Hanifi Rohingya keyboard and font

Copying from this page works on any device: tap a character in the grid, then paste. To type Rohingya regularly, install a Hanifi Rohingya keyboard app on Android or iPhone, or a keyboard layout on a computer, and a font that has the script. Google's free Noto Sans Hanifi Rohingya covers every character here; without such a font the letters show as empty boxes.

Everything here is Unicode text from the Hanifi Rohingya block, U+10D00 to U+10D3F, added in Unicode 11.0 in 2018. In HTML a letter can be written by its number: 𐴀 gives 𐴀 and 𐴰 gives the digit 𐴰. While editing mixed Rohingya and Latin text the cursor may jump the opposite way from what you expect; that is normal for right-to-left writing.

Where Rohingya is spoken, and its other spellings

Rohingya is the language of the Rohingya people, whose home is Rakhine State in western Myanmar 🇲🇲. Since the violence of 2017 a great many live in Bangladesh 🇧🇩, in the camps around Cox's Bazar. CLDR estimates around 1.9 million speakers, about 980,000 in Myanmar and 890,000 in Bangladesh; refugee counts in Bangladesh alone run to about a million, and there are large communities in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and India. Hanifi Rohingya is learned in community classes, including in the camps.

Rohingya is an Indo-Aryan language, closely related to Chittagonian across the border and more distantly to Bangla; it is not related to Burmese. Before and beside Hanifi it has been written in an Arabic-based spelling and in a Latin one often called Rohingyalish. For the neighbouring scripts see the Bangla Alphabet & Letters, Burmese Alphabet & Letters and Arabic Letters & Symbols collections; the Myanmar Emoji & Symbols and Bangladesh Emoji pages have the flags, ৳ and the emoji for each country.