Rohingya Hanifi

The Hanifi Rohingya script was created in the 1980s by Mohammad Hanif and several other scholars and community members to provide the Rohingya people of Myanmar (Burma) with a writing system suited to their own language. The Rohingya had previously written their language using Arabic, Burmese, Roman, and Urdu scripts, none of which fully captured the phonological distinctions of Rohingya. The Hanifi script is an alphabet written from right to left and uses Arabic-influenced letterforms, reflecting the predominantly Muslim identity of the Rohingya community. It includes dedicated characters for sounds specific to Rohingya, as well as its own set of digits. Since its creation, the script has been used for literacy education, religious materials, and community communication. It was added to Unicode in version 11.0 (2018) and has gained considerable traction as a standardised writing system for Rohingya-language materials.