The Rohingya language is an eastern Indo-Aryan language spoken in Northern Rakhine State (Arakan) in Myanmar. The Rohingya language is spoken by around 1.8 million people and it has no similarities with Burmese language. The Arakan soil is a continuation of the Chittagong plain (a division of Bangladesh), was neither purely a Burmese nor an Indian Territory until 18th century. The language similarities between Chittagong and Arakan is influenced by their geographical, cultural and historical considerations.
The earliest Rohingya writing dated back over 350 years and it used Arabic script. However, the writing format was lost during the British colonial period from 1826 until 1946 and therefore English, Urdu and Farsi languages were mainly used for written communications. Then Hanifi script, which is a blend of Arabic, Burmese and Roman scripts, was developed in 1975. In the 1980s a new script for Rohingya, known as Hanifi, was created by Mohammad Hanif and colleagues.
The Hanifi failed among the people due to difficulty in using this script on computers. The latest writing known as Rohingyalish is based only on Roman alphabets which are readily available on all modern media approached by E.M. Siddique. Rohingyalish comprises 26 Roman letters, 5/6 accented vowels, and 2 additional Latin characters for retroflex and nasal sounds. This script proved to be extremely easy to learn and understand as the written and spoken language match very closely.
The character set table of the Rohingya language writing system uses the Latin letters shown above (ç and ñ with green background). The vowels are written both unaccented (aeiou) and accented (áéíóú). The use of c, ç and ñ is adapted to the language; c represents (Engɽish sh), ç is the retroflex r, and ñ indicates a nasalized vowel (e.g., fañs or ‘five’). These can all be accessed from an English keyboard.
Rohingya has primarily 25 native consonant phonemes. There are some other consonant phonemes which are from foreign languages such as Arabic, Bengali, Burmese and Urdu. Rohingya language distinguishes 12 tenses.
Apparently, Rohingya language needs more necessary tools to understand it’s structure. An in-depth theoretical ideas in the major areas of linguistics such as phonetics, phonology, syntax, and semantics as well as the applications of these needed to be studied to flourish and represent Rohingya Language to it’s highest rank.
