Rohingya

Hanifi Rohingya script orthography notes

Letters

Combining marks

Numbers

Punctuation

Other

Vowel sounds

Vowels can be nasalised.

Diphthongs often start or end in j or w, but vowels can also appear together with no intervening consonant.

Consonant sounds

	labial	dental	alveolar	post- alveolar	retroflex	palatal	velar	glottal
stop	p b	t d			ʈ ɖ	c ɟ	k ɡ	ʔ
fricative	f		s z	ʃ		ç	x	h
nasal	m		n			ɲ	ŋ
approximant	w		l			j
trill/flap			ɾ		ɽ

Basic vowels

Rohingya uses the following vowel letters.

Rohingya vowel letters are all normal, spacing characters. With the exception of 𐴀 [U+10D00 HANIFI ROHINGYA LETTER A], they are never written alone, but have to follow a consonant.

A standalone vowel at the beginning of a word is always preceded by 𐴀 [U+10D00 HANIFI ROHINGYA LETTER A], which acts as a vowel carrier, eg. 𐴀𐴝𐴣𐴍𐴥𐴝𐴓𐴞 𐴀𐴦𐴟𐴘

Similarly, in a sequence of vowels inside a word, the non-initial vowels are preceded by the carrier, eg. 𐴅𐴝𐴕𐴟𐴀𐴝𐴌𐴞

When 𐴀 [U+10D00 HANIFI ROHINGYA LETTER A] occurs without a following vowel letter at the beginning or in the middle of a word, it represents the vowel ɔ, eg. 𐴁𐴡𐴀𐴌 𐴉𐴝𐴃𐴝

Long vowels are indicated using tone marks.

Diphthongs

Diphthongs beginning or ending in the glides j or w can be written using 𐴙 [U+10D19 HANIFI ROHINGYA LETTER KINNA YA] and 𐴗 [U+10D17 HANIFI ROHINGYA LETTER KINNA WA], respectively. eg. 𐴉𐴗𐴝 𐴇𐴥𐴝𐴙𐴓𐴢

Observation: It appears that 𐴘 [U+10D18 HANIFI ROHINGYA LETTER YA] can also be used to create diphthongs, eg. 𐴁𐴝𐴘

Nasalisation

Nasalised vowels are indicated by writing 𐴣 [U+10D23 HANIFI ROHINGYA MARK NA KHONNA] after the vowel, eg. 𐴔𐴦𐴝𐴣 𐴈𐴝𐴣𐴓𐴞

Vowel length

Vowel length is primarily affected by tone.

Observation: Also, it seems possible to repeat a vowel to lengthen a sound, eg. 𐴈𐴡𐴀𐴡 xoʔo xo:

Consonants with no following vowel

Consonant clusters are typically written just as a sequence of consonant letters, eg. 𐴑𐴡𐴔𐴂𐴘𐴟𐴄𐴝𐴌

At the end of a word, or when just the consonant is written alone, 𐴢 [U+10D22 HANIFI ROHINGYA MARK SAKIN] is used after some consonants when there is no following vowel.

Consonants that typically take the sakin include the following:

And those that don't:

However, these rules are not hard and fast. For example, m may be written either way (see the example of 'turnip' below).

Examples: 𐴇𐴥𐴝𐴙𐴓𐴢 𐴐𐴥𐴝𐴓𐴒𐴡𐴔𐴢 𐴄𐴝𐴘𐴧𐴡𐴕 𐴋𐴥𐴠𐴙𐴇𐴝𐴑

Vowel sounds to characters

This section maps Rohingya vowel sounds to common graphemes in the Hanifi Rohingya orthography. Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.

Sounds listed as 'infrequent' are allophones, or sounds used for foreign words, etc.

Consonant letters

Gemination

Geminated consonant sounds are indicated using 𐴧 [U+10D27 HANIFI ROHINGYA SIGN TASSI], which is typed immediately after the consonant and before any following vowel, and which is rendered above the consonant letter, eg. compare the z sounds in the following 𐴎𐴥𐴞𐴘𐴡𐴎𐴧𐴝𐴔𐴝𐴘

Consonant clusters

Consonant clusters are written simply as a sequence of consonants, eg. 𐴑𐴟𐴌𐴥𐴏𐴞 𐴀𐴞𐴏𐴃𐴞𐴌𐴞 𐴇𐴥𐴠𐴚𐴒𐴝𐴌

Consonant sounds to characters

This section maps Rohingya consonant sounds to common graphemes in the Hanifi Rohingya orthography. Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.

Sounds listed as 'infrequent' are allophones, or sounds used for foreign words, etc.

Digits

Hanifi Rohingya has a set of native digits

Numbers are written left-to-right within the overall right-to-left flow.

Managing text direction

Unicode provides a set of 10 formatting characters that can be used to control the direction of text when displayed. These characters have no visual form in the rendered text, however text editing applications may have a way to show their location.

‫‬RLE [U+202B RIGHT-TO-LEFT EMBEDDING], ‪‬LRE [U+202A LEFT-TO-RIGHT EMBEDDING], and ‬PDF [U+202C POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING] are in widespread use to set the base direction of a range of characters. RLE/LRE come at the start, and PDF at the end of a range of characters for which the base direction is to be set.

More recently, the Unicode Standard added a set of characters which do the same thing but also isolate the content from surrounding characters, in order to avoid spillover effects. They are ⁧⁩RLI [U+2067 RIGHT-TO-LEFT ISOLATE], ⁦⁩LRI [U+2066 LEFT-TO-RIGHT ISOLATE], and ⁩PDI [U+2069 POP DIRECTIONAL ISOLATE]. The Unicode Standard recommends that these be used instead of RLE, LRE, and PDF.

There is also ⁨⁩FSI [U+2068 FIRST STRONG ISOLATE], used initially to set the base direction according to the first recognised strongly-directional character.

؜ALM [U+061C ARABIC LETTER MARK] is used to produce correct sequencing of numeric data.

‏RLM [U+200F RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK] and ‎LRM [U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK] are invisible characters with strong directional properties that are also sometimes used to produce the correct ordering of text.

For more information about how to use these formatting characters see How to use Unicode controls for bidi text. Note, however, that when writing HTML you should generally use markup rather than these control codes. For information about that, see Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts.

Cursive text

Hanifi Rohingya is cursive, ie. letters in a word are joined up.

Nearly all letters join on both sides. 𐴢 [U+10D22 HANIFI ROHINGYA MARK SAKIN] joins only to the right. And 𐴀 [U+10D00 HANIFI ROHINGYA LETTER A] joins only to the left, which is very unusual. Fonts automatically produce the appropriate joining form for a code point, according to its visual context.

The cursive treatment produces only minor changes to glyph shapes in most cases, other than extensions to the baseline. 𐴔 [U+10D14 HANIFI ROHINGYA LETTER MA] is an exception, with different final and medial/initial shapes (see fig_joining_forms).

There is a style of font which behaves slightly differently, and appears to be quite commonly used. fig_cursive_triangle_noories shows an example. Note how the n doesn't join to the right, and the o falls short of the l. The glyphs in this font don't have joining strokes to the right, and taper off and barely touch (if they do) to the left.

The following tables show all joining forms.

Font styling & weight

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Grapheme clusters

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Word boundaries

Word units are separated by spaces.

Phrase & section boundaries

Rohingya uses a mixture of Arabic and ASCII punctuation, and may also use Myanmar signs.

Observation: It seems to be standard practise to separate the punctuation from the foregoing text with a space.

Observation: Two online sites use punctuation that looks like the Burmese section marks, ၊ [U+104A MYANMAR SIGN LITTLE SECTION] and ။ [U+104B MYANMAR SIGN SECTION], except that they use different characters. One uses a single or double 𐴱 [U+10D31 HANIFI ROHINGYA DIGIT ONE], the other uses | [U+007C VERTICAL LINE] or |𐴱 [U+007C VERTICAL LINE + U+10D31 HANIFI ROHINGYA DIGIT ONE]. (The page from which the example in fig_section_signs is taken also uses other strange punctuation choices, such as the Arabic thousands separator instead of the Arabic comma, that can be seen in the bottom line of the example.)

Bracketed text

Rohingya commonly uses ASCII parentheses to insert parenthetical information into text.

Mirrored characters

It is important to note that the Unicode names for parentheses, brackets, and other paired characters should be ignored. LEFT should be read as if it said START, and RIGHT as END. The direction in which the glyphs point will be automatically determined according to the base direction of the text.

The number of characters that are mirrored in this way is around 550, most of which are mathematical symbols. Some are single characters, rather than pairs. The following are some of the more common ones used for Rohingya.

(␣)␣<␣>␣[␣]␣{␣}

Quotations & citations

Rohingya texts use quotation marks around quotations. Of course, due to keyboard design, quotations may also be surrounded by ASCII double and single quote marks. Note, however, that the order of use is different from that in LTR text, because they are not automatically mirrored.

Unlike the bracketing quotation marks, these characters are not mirrored during display. This means that LEFT means use on the left, and RIGHT means use on the right.

Emphasis

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Abbreviation, ellipsis & repetition

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Inline notes & annotations

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Other punctuation

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Other inline text decoration

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Line breaking & hyphenation

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Observation: Lines appear to be broken at word boundaries.

Show (default) line-breaking properties for characters in the Rohingya language.

Text alignment & justification

Examples of printed matter show full justification. A baseline extension is frequently used to stretch words in order to achieve flush lines (see fig_justification).

Pandey recommends using ـ [U+0640 ARABIC TATWEEL] for this.p,12 However, it should be noted that the tatweel character is only useful if the text is static. If window resizing or inserted text cause the line breaks to appear between different words, the tatweels will end up in the wrong place.

Text spacing

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This section looks at ways in which spacing is applied between characters over and above that which is introduced during justification.

Baselines, line height, etc.

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Rohingya uses the so-called 'alphabetic' baseline, which is the same as for Latin and many other scripts.

Counters, lists, etc.

You can experiment with counter styles using the Counter styles converter. Patterns for using these styles in CSS can be found in Ready-made Counter Styles, and we use the names of those patterns here to refer to the various styles.

Hanifi Rohingya uses numeric counters.

Numeric

The numeric style is decimal-based and uses these digits.

𐴱␣𐴲␣𐴳␣𐴴␣𐴵␣𐴶␣𐴷␣𐴸␣𐴹␣𐴰

Examples:

𐴲␣𐴳␣𐴴␣𐴵␣𐴶␣𐴲𐴲␣𐴳𐴳␣𐴴𐴴␣𐴵𐴵␣𐴲𐴲𐴲␣𐴳𐴳𐴳␣𐴴𐴴𐴴␣𐴵𐴵𐴵

Prefixes and suffixes

Observation: Further examples are needed to clarify the standard prefix and/or suffix for lists. The examples in fig_counters show circled numbers followed by a hyphen, and numbers followed by an equals sign.

General page layout & progression

Arabic books, magazines, etc., are bound on the right-hand side, and pages progress from right to left.

Columns are vertical but run right-to-left across the page.

Grids & tables

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Notes, footnotes, etc

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Forms & user interaction

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Page numbering, running headers, etc

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