Ol Onal Letter A

It represents the open /a/ sound in Bhumij.

The slashes in /a/ mark a sound, roughly an open “ah,” not the English letter name “ay.” Bhumij is also written in Odia, Bengali, Devanagari, and Latin scripts. Ol Onal is also called Bhumij Lipi or Bhumij Onal.

How did Ol Onal take shape?

It was developed as an alphabet for writing Bhumij.

From 1981–1992, Mahendra Nath Sardar developed Ol Onal to write Bhumij. In 1992, the Odisha-based community group Adim Bhumij Samaj selected it in a contest for a Bhumij script, after three proposals were considered. Bhumij was also written with Odia, Bengali, Devanagari, and Latin scripts.

By 2022, documented uses included lessons and primers, ritual writing, banners, wedding invitations, memorial inscriptions, and wall paintings. The original design also had lowercase Galang Onal, but teaching and printed materials used the capital Ol Onal form; Galang Onal fell out of use.

Why can old Ol Onal text look like Latin?

Some early fonts stored Ol Onal in Latin character slots.

Fonts made in 2013–14 mapped Ol Onal characters to code positions for basic Latin characters. Text made with one can look like Latin when another font reads those positions normally; displaying it as Ol Onal requires the matching font.