Rohingya Arabic Alphabet

The Rohingya Arabic Alphabet is a modified Arabic script for the Rohingya language. Rohingya today is written in three scripts, Hanifi Rohingya script, Arabic (Rohingya Fonna) Alphabet, and Latin (Rohingyalish). Rohingya was first written in the 19th century with a version of the Perso-Arabic script. In 1975, an orthographic Arabic script was developed and approved by the community leaders, based on the Urdu alphabet but with unique innovations to make the script suitable to Rohingya.^[1][2]

In the 1980s, Mohammad Hanif and his colleagues created the suitable phonetic script based on Arabic letters; the Hanifi Rohingya script; it has been compared to the N’ko script. This script has gained popularity among Rohingya speakers, challenging the position of Arabic script, and presenting itself as a uniquely Rohingya script.

Nevertheless, as most Rohingya children attend Arabic and Quranic classes and are intimately familiar with the Arabic script, Rohingya Arabic script remains suitable and relevant for Rohingya language. Tests that have been conducted suggest that this script can be learned in a matter of hours if the reader has learned Arabic in a madrassa.

One of the most significant advocates of Rohingya Arabic script has been Kyaw Hla Aung, a world-renowned Rohingya lawyer and civil rights activist.^[1]

One of the most important features of Rohingya Arabic Alphabet, a feature which makes this script unique among other adaptions of the Arabic script, is tone markers. Another feature of Rohingya Arabic script is that unlike its parent systems, Persian and Urdu, vowel diacritics are essential for writing in Rohingya. Whereas Persian and Urdu use three diacritics (rarely written) as well as three letters to represent their 6 vowel sounds, Rohingya has been modified to eliminate the reliance on such a dual system, instead solely relying on diacritics. In doing so, 3 new diacritics have been introduced to Rohingya, which are "curly" versions of the three existing diacritics.