The Hanifi Rohingya alphabet

Background

The script was developed from the 1980s by Mohammed Hanif and collaborators, drawing on Arabic and Burmese letter shapes but forming its own alphabet with distinct letters for Rohingya sounds. Unlike an Arabic-based spelling convention, it writes vowels as full letters. It was added to Unicode in 2018 (version 11.0), which is what makes it possible to type, search and store Hanifi text reliably rather than as images.

Text on this page requires a font that covers the block, such as Noto Sans Hanifi Rohingya, which the site loads for you.

Character table

The table lists the characters the site's deterministic transliteration engine knows about, with the official Unicode name, the code point, and the Latin sequence used in Rohingyalish. Mappings marked draft are seeded from the Unicode names and still await a linguist's review — treat them as provisional.

Combining marks

The characters in the range U+10D24–U+10D27 are combining marks: they attach to the letter before them and are never displayed or copied on their own. The transliteration engine keeps each mark bound to its base letter, and rows above whose Latin column shows a name in braces are placeholders where the correct Latin correspondence has not yet been set by a linguist.

Trying it out

The translator shows Hanifi and Latin stacked for every result, with a Hanifi on-screen keyboard on the input box, so you can type directly in the script without installing anything.