Rohingya language Foundation
Rohang is the ancient name of Arakan State, Burma (Myanmar). The word "Rohingya" consists of two words Rohing and Ya. Rohing means the old kingdom Rohang which is currently known as Arakan and Ya means the inhabitant of the place, state or country.
The first writing of Rohingya Language was more than 300 years ago and used Arabic scripts. However, due to lack of all necessary sounds available with Arabic scripts, a new innovative system has been developed using 28 Latin Alphabets whereas 26 alphabets are from todays English alphabets.
The two new characters Ç and Ñ, shown in bold below, are for the two distinctive Asian sounds known as tongue rolling sound and nasal sound. The character C is not required since its sound can be substituted with K and S instead but Rohingya language uses it to replace Sh sound with C since Rohingya heavily uses this Sh sound very heavily even multiple times in a word. So "Ca" and "Ce" sounds as "Sha" and "She".
a | b | c | ç | d | e | f |
g | h | i | j | k | l | m |
n | ñ | o | p | q | r | s |
t | u | v | w | x | y | z |
Rohingya chracter set
As analyzed throughly, there are ten basic vowel sounds in Rohingya dialect which are the building blocks of all Rohingya words which may approach about fifty thousands or more. Again these ten vowel sounds can be divided into two categories, namely, the staright sounds and the circular sounds. For example in the word aiyo (meaning come) has ai as circular sound and yo as straight sounds.
There are six straight sounds, where the first five sounds are represented by the five vowels a,e,i,o,u and the last one is represented by the two combined vowel ou.
The circular sounds are four and represented by the four vowels a,e,o,u each suffixed by "i" as follows.
To make the word pronounce exactly the way Rohingya people speak, there are three flavours or colorings that the Rohingya Language uses as shown below.
#1 Soft and Stress
Normal vowels aeiou are used for soft sounds and acented vowels áéíóú are used for stressed sounds. e.g.
Ful = bridge/hole
Fúl = flower
#2 Extend
To extend (pulling horizontally) the sound of any vowel we need the same vowel twice. e.g.
Fool = fool
Maana = free
Muu = face
#3 Stress and Extend
In Rohingya there are many words which include both stressing and extending in the same word making he language much much difficult. e.g.
Gaa = body
Gaá = sing
Gáa = infection
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