What ᱻ means
It lengthens the vowel immediately before it.
In ᱮᱻ, the e vowel is long. In ᱮᱸᱻ, ᱸ nasalizes the vowel, letting air pass through the nose, and relā lengthens it afterward.
Ol Chiki gave Santali a dedicated alphabet.
Raghunath Murmu developed Ol Chiki in 1925 and showed it at an exhibition in Mayurbhanj, then a princely state, in 1939. Santali had also been written in Bengali, Devanagari, Odia and the Roman (Latin) script. Ol Chiki offered a dedicated alphabet that represented Santali sounds more precisely, including consonants pronounced with a brief closure in the throat and vowels spoken more weakly.
Primers, magazines, literature, village classes and schools helped spread the script. Ol Chiki became a marker of Santal unity and identity, while Santali continues to be written in other scripts too.
How do I type ᱻ?
Type it after the vowel it lengthens.
Relā is its own character, not an ASCII tilde or a precomposed vowel. The MediaWiki Project Ol chiki user guide documents ShiftQ for the Sarjom baha phonetic layout; other layouts may differ.
Its tilde-like shape varies by font. A line break does not split it from the word it modifies.
A spelling mark in Santali written with Ol Chiki; it follows the vowel whose length it marks.
Its tilde-like shape does not make it punctuation; relā marks vowel length.
Part of the collection
Who writes ᱻ
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Don't confuse it with
2
Related characters
3
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why does ᱻ follow the vowel?
Because Ol Chiki writes relā as a separate modifier after the vowel; it does not sit over the letter like a combining accent.
More like this
10
How to type or find ᱻ
- Also called
- relā · rela · relaa
- Search it as
- Ol Chiki vowel length · Santali long vowel · Ol Chiki vowel mark · tilde · pharkaa
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ᱻ\1C7BCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.