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The Rohingya people are an indigenous ethnic minority of Burma, primarily residing in Arakan State. The term "Rohingya" refers to both the language and the people. The Rohingya language, spoken for centuries, has undergone various script developments. In the late 1970s, Scholar Muhammad Hanif, along with his colleagues, developed a distinct modern script based on Rohingya phonetics. Since then, thousands have adopted this script for reading and communication, leading to the publication and translation of numerous books, magazines, newspapers, and other content, as well as the global adoption of tools and technologies supporting the language.
The script was finally developed by Maulana Hanif in the 1980s. This script is modeled upon 28 Rohingya alphabets and 10 Rohingya vowels derived from old Sanskrit and Nagori Language's alphabet . Collecting from the Stone inscriptions of Arakan State by which forefathers of Rohingya had been writing and speaking , which were found in the Myanmar Museum and London Museum, as documents , it is a constructed script and has no genetic affiliation to other scripts.
Since 1983, the Rohingya Hanifi script has been launched in learning and teaching in various fields in Rohingya villages in Arakan State, as well as in Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, and other countries where Rohingya people have taken refuge.
Modern Developments
In 2000, Engineer Muhammad Noor developed the first digital typeface font for the Rohingya language, enabling digital usage for the first time. Educational efforts, including school curricula and children’s books, were also developed to promote literacy in Rohingya. A Unicode proposal submitted by a PhD student from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2011 was eventually approved and released in 2017. In 2018, Muhammad Noor further contributed by creating the Rohingya Unicode font and keyboard. Google adopted and introduced the first open-source font, Noto Sans Hanifi Rohingya, in 2019, followed by its integration into Android version 11 for phones and tablets. The same year, iOS and Libra Office adopted the Rohingya language. The CLDR library, managed by Unicode, opened a repository for the Rohingya language, facilitating access to global digital libraries and translation tools. Since then, multiple news channels, educational institutions, translation libraries, and international NGOs have adopted the language as a medium of communication. The Rohingya Hanifi script has gained significant demand and adoption, especially among the Rohingya diaspora.