Hanifi Rohingya Letter Sha

It represents /ʃ/, roughly the “sh” sound.

Maulana Mohammed Hanif and others developed the recognisable Hanifi Rohingya script in the 1980s to give the language a dedicated alphabet. Rohingya had also been written in Arabic, Burmese, and Latin scripts, so Hanifi changed the written form, not the sound of this consonant. It borrows Arabic’s right-to-left joining structure, but the Unicode proposal describes Hanifi as a constructed script with no direct genetic affiliation to Arabic. In a 2023 study in Penang, researchers reported that some participants preferred Latin-based Rohingya because it avoided learning another set of letters; that local finding does not speak for all Rohingya readers.

Why can 𐴐 appear as a box?

The font may not include Hanifi Rohingya characters.

Hanifi is written from right to left, and its letters can join their neighbors. So 𐴐 may look different within a word than it does by itself. A font without Hanifi Rohingya support may display a box where the letter should be; the box is a display problem, not another character.

How do I type 𐴐?

Select it from a Hanifi Rohingya keyboard’s letters.

A virtual Hanifi keyboard provides 𐴐 in its selectable letters row. If it appears as a box after you enter it, the device also needs a font that supports Hanifi Rohingya.