The Rohingya language

Who speaks it

Rohingya is the first language of the Rohingya people, most of whom come from northern Rakhine State in western Myanmar. Since 2017 the largest concentration of speakers has been in the camps around Cox's Bazar in south-eastern Bangladesh, with smaller communities in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Ireland. Estimates of the total number of speakers vary widely because there has been no reliable census of the population; figures in the range of one to two million are commonly cited.

Where it sits in the language family

Rohingya belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family. Its closest relative is Chittagonian, spoken immediately across the border in south-eastern Bangladesh; the two are mutually intelligible to a large degree, and linguists have long argued about where one ends and the other begins. Both are related to Bengali, but a Bengali speaker cannot simply read or follow Rohingya. Centuries of contact have left Rohingya with a large vocabulary borrowed from Arabic, Persian and Urdu, alongside Burmese and English loanwords picked up more recently.

Rohingya is not a dialect of Burmese, and it is not written in the Burmese script. This matters in practice: machine translation systems that treat Rohingya as a variety of Burmese or Bengali produce text that Rohingya speakers do not recognise.

Dialect variation

Speech differs noticeably between townships — Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathedaung all have recognisable local features — and between generations inside the camps, where young people mix in more Chittagonian, Burmese and English. There is no single agreed standard variety and no academy that sets one. Where our dictionary entries note a regional preference, it is recorded as a dialect note rather than presented as the one correct form.

How Rohingya is written

There are several competing writing systems, and speakers use different ones:

• Hanifi Rohingya — a purpose-built right-to-left alphabet developed from the 1980s, encoded in Unicode since 2018.
• Rohingyalish — a Latin-alphabet system using only the 26 basic letters plus accents for tone, easy to type on any keyboard.
• Arabic-based spellings, including older Urdu- and Persian-influenced conventions still used in religious writing.
• Burmese and Bengali script, used ad hoc by people schooled in those systems.

This site shows Hanifi Rohingya and Rohingyalish together for every result, so a reader who knows only one of them can still follow.

Why written Rohingya is scarce

Rohingya has been overwhelmingly a spoken language. Access to formal education in Myanmar was severely restricted for decades, literacy in any script is uneven, and almost no published corpus exists. That scarcity is the reason this project is built the way it is: instead of letting a language model guess, translations are grounded in a word list that human reviewers have checked, and uncertain words are flagged rather than invented. You can see the exact size of that word list on the corpus data page.