Rohingyalish, the Latin writing system
Rohingyalish writes Rohingya using ordinary Latin letters, so it can be typed on any phone or keyboard without installing a font.
What it is
Rohingyalish (also written Rohingyalish or simply “Rohingya Latin”) is a romanisation developed so that Rohingya could be written with the 26 letters already present on every keyboard. It became widely used online and in messaging, where installing a specialised font or keyboard is often impractical, and it is the script most Rohingya text on the internet is written in today.
The basic principles
- One sound, one spelling. The system aims to be phonemic: a word is written the way it is pronounced, not the way a cognate is spelled in Bengali or Urdu.
- Doubled vowels mark length. A long vowel is written by repeating the vowel letter, as in maa (mother).
- Accents mark tone. Rohingya distinguishes words by tone, and an acute accent on a vowel (á, í, ó, ú, é) carries that distinction. Dropping the accent can change the word, which is why a system that strips accents is unsafe.
- Digraphs for retroflex and aspirated sounds. Combinations such as tt, dd, rr, kh, sh, ng and ny stand for single Rohingya consonants, not for two separate letters.
- No capital-letter rules borrowed from English. Capitalisation carries no meaning in the sound system.
Why this site writes Latin first
Our translator produces Rohingyalish only. The Hanifi Rohingya version you see beside it is never written by the language model; it is generated from the Latin by a deterministic rule engine, so the two always correspond and one cannot drift from the other. Each rule in that engine is listed and can be reviewed by a linguist — see the Hanifi alphabet page for the character inventory it works from.
Practical advice when typing
- Keep the accents. If your keyboard cannot produce them, say so when you contribute, so a reviewer can restore them.
- Do not “correct” Rohingyalish spelling towards English spelling conventions.
- Spelling variation is normal and expected; where our dictionary records more than one accepted spelling, both are kept rather than one being deleted.
You can look up any word in the dictionary, which shows the Latin and Hanifi forms side by side.