Ol Chiki Letter Aam

It writes Santali’s m sound.

Ol Chiki is an alphabet: ᱢ represents a consonant on its own, without a built-in vowel or a joining form. It can stand beside other Ol Chiki letters without changing shape.

How did Ol Chiki become a Santali script?

It was designed for Santali and spread through print.

During the 1930s, Raghunath Murmu developed printing blocks and a hand press with support from Mayurbhanj State, a locally ruled princely state. He presented Ol Chiki at the state’s exhibition in 1939. It was designed to spell Santali sounds that other scripts used for the language did not represent clearly: checked consonants (those ending abruptly) and reduced vowels (pronounced weakly). Santali had also been written with Latin letters and Brahmi-family scripts (South Asian writing systems), including Eastern Brahmi, Devanagari, Bengali, and Odia. These are other ways of writing Santali, not visual ancestors of Ol Chiki letters.

Ol Chiki later became a public sign of Santali literacy and cultural autonomy. A 2017 field study of Santali print in West Bengal describes younger editors choosing Ol Chiki for their magazines, while Santali publishing continued in other scripts too. That choice can signal commitment to Santali cultural life; the letter ᱢ has no separate social meaning from its script.