Santali Alphabet (Ol Chiki)

Santali (ᱥᱟᱱᱛᱟᱲᱤ) has its own script, Ol Chiki (ᱚᱞ ᱪᱤᱠᱤ), created by Pandit Raghunath Murmu of Mayurbhanj in Odisha in 1925. Unlike the Indian scripts around it, Ol Chiki is a true alphabet: every vowel is a full letter of its own, there are no vowel signs attached to consonants and no conjuncts, so a word is simply its letters written left to right. ᱡᱚᱦᱟᱨ (johar, the Santali greeting) is just ᱡ + ᱚ + ᱦ + ᱟ + ᱨ.

The alphabet has 30 letters, taught in six rows of five. Each row begins with one of the six vowels, ᱚ ᱟ ᱤ ᱩ ᱮ ᱳ, followed by four consonants: ᱚ ᱛ ᱜ ᱝ ᱞ, ᱟ ᱠ ᱡ ᱢ ᱣ, ᱤ ᱥ ᱦ ᱧ ᱨ, ᱩ ᱪ ᱫ ᱬ ᱭ, ᱮ ᱯ ᱰ ᱱ ᱲ, ᱳ ᱴ ᱵ ᱶ ᱷ. That is also the order of the letters in Unicode, which is why the grid on this page reads row by row.

The letter names are part of the system. The vowels are named with an l in front, la, laa, li, lu, le, lo, and each consonant is named by its row's vowel plus its own sound: at, ag, ang, al, then aak, aaj, aam, aaw, then is, ih, iny, ir, and so on to oh. Ol Chiki has no capital and small letters: searches for "santali small letters" find the same 30 shapes, and a name or sentence begins with an ordinary letter.

What the Ol Chiki letters sound like

The six basic vowel letters represent ᱚ (an open o, as in English law), ᱟ (a), ᱤ (i), ᱩ (u), ᱮ (e) and ᱳ (o). The plain consonants include ᱛ t, ᱠ k, ᱪ c (as in church), ᱯ p, ᱥ s, ᱦ h, ᱨ r, ᱞ l, ᱢ m, ᱱ n, ᱣ w and ᱭ y. Santali also has the nasals ᱝ (ng), ᱧ (ny) and ᱬ, and the retroflex sounds made with the tongue curled back: ᱴ, ᱰ and the flap ᱲ, the r-like sound in ᱥᱟᱱᱛᱟᱲᱤ itself.

Four letters do double duty: ᱜ (ag), ᱡ (aaj), ᱫ (ud) and ᱵ (ob) write g, j, d and b, but in word-final position they represent Santali's glottalized (ejective) consonants, conventionally written k', c', t', p'. Ol Chiki uses the same letters for their voiced counterparts in other positions.

Aspirated consonants have no letters of their own: you write the consonant followed by ᱷ (oh), so ᱠᱷ is kh, ᱜᱷ gh, ᱛᱷ th, ᱫᱷ dh and ᱵᱷ bh. Many Indian names and borrowed words need this pattern.

The six Ol Chiki marks: ᱸ ᱹ ᱺ ᱻ ᱼ ᱽ

After the letters come six small marks written after a letter. ᱸ (mu ttuddag) makes the vowel before it nasal; mu means nose. ᱹ (gaahlaa ttuddaag) marks extra vowels in the Santal Parganas dialect, as in ᱟᱹ, a central vowel close to the a in English about. ᱺ (mu-gaahlaa ttuddaag) does both at once.

ᱻ (relaa) lengthens the sound before it. ᱼ (phaarkaa) is the glottal protector: it keeps a checked consonant checked when a vowel follows. ᱽ (ahad) does the opposite job, marking that ᱜ ᱡ ᱫ ᱵ at the end of a syllable are to be said as full g, j, d, b and not as checked sounds.

In Unicode these marks are separate characters, U+1C78 to U+1C7D, typed after the letter they belong to. On their own some of them look like a dot or a short stroke, so it is easy to drop them when copying; check that they survived the paste.

How to type Santali in Ol Chiki on a phone, laptop and in Word

Phones: Gboard on Android offers Santali keyboards: open Gboard → Settings → Languages → Add keyboard, search for Santali and pick the Ol Chiki layout. Once added, you switch to it with the globe key, and WhatsApp, Facebook and SMS take Ol Chiki text directly. On older phones whose fonts lack Ol Chiki, the letters show as empty boxes; installing a phone update or an Ol Chiki font fixes it.

Windows: recent versions of Windows 10 and 11 list an Ol Chiki keyboard for Santali under Settings → Time & language → Language & region → Add a language, and the built-in Nirmala UI font displays Ol Chiki, so text typed this way works in MS Word, browsers and email. Google's free Noto Sans Ol Chiki font covers the whole script for documents and websites. Older Santali files typed with non-Unicode fonts turn into Latin gibberish when copied out; everything on this page is Unicode.

HTML: Ol Chiki sits in the Unicode block U+1C50 to U+1C7F: ᱚ for ᱚ, ᱷ for ᱷ, ᱐ to ᱙ for the digits ᱐–᱙ and ᱾ for the mucaad ᱾. Anywhere else, click a letter on this page to copy it.

Santali numbers, punctuation and the rupee

Ol Chiki has its own digits: ᱐ ᱑ ᱒ ᱓ ᱔ ᱕ ᱖ ᱗ ᱘ ᱙, used in the same place-value way as 0–9, so ᱑᱐ is 10, ᱑᱐᱐ is 100 and the year 2026 is ᱒᱐᱒᱖. Searches for "ol chiki number 1 to 100" need nothing more than these ten characters. Watch the look-alikes: ᱐ zero is a small circle, and several digits resemble letters, so copy them from the digit row.

A sentence ends with the mucaad ᱾, and the double mucaad ᱿ marks a bigger break, such as the end of a paragraph or verse. The comma, question mark and exclamation mark are taken over from Latin writing: ᱪᱮᱫ? (what?). Money is written in Indian rupees with ₹.

Santali is spoken by about 7.8 million people in India by CLDR's estimate, most of them in Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha, with communities in Bihar and Assam and across the borders in Bangladesh and Nepal. It belongs to the Munda branch of the Austroasiatic family, so its closest relatives are Mundari and Ho, not the Indo-Aryan Hindi, Bangla and Odia spoken around it. Santali is also written in Latin, Bangla, Odia and Devanagari letters, while Ol Chiki is promoted by Santal organizations and used in schools in West Bengal and elsewhere, and is the script most closely tied to the Santali language movement.