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Imagine there was a script INVENTED FROM SCRATCH BY ONE MAN in the 20th century, now used by hundreds of thousands of people and becoming the defacto standard for a language spoken by 7 million people - and you& #39;d never heard of it.
It& #39;s called Ol Chiki - ᱚᱞ ᱪᱤᱠᱤ. 1/6
It& #39;s called Ol Chiki - ᱚᱞ ᱪᱤᱠᱤ. 1/6
The Ol Chiki (ᱚᱞ ᱪᱤᱠᱤ) script is the official writing system for Santali, an Austroasiatic language recognized as a regional language in India. It has 30 letters, the forms of which are intended to evoke natural shapes. Ol Chiki script is written from left to right. 2/6
Ol Chiki was created in 1925 by Raghunath Murmu for the Santali language, and publicized first in 1939 at a Mayurbhanj State exhibition. Previously, Santali had been written with the Latin script. However, Santali is not an Indo-Aryan language... 3/6
..... and Indic scripts did not have letters for all of Santali& #39;s phonemes, especially its stop consonants and vowels, which made writing the language accurately in an unmodified Indic script difficult. Unlike most Indic scripts, Ol Chiki is an alphabet, not an abugida. 4/6
Ol Chiki has benefited from the same surge in North East Indian regional nationalism that has benefited Meetei Mayek in nearby Manipur. There is now a thriving vernacular publishing industry in Ol Chiki, with poetry, epics, romance novels, histories & primers all appearing. 5/6
Raghunath Murmu is today a revered figure amongst Santali& #39;s, and his invention is now undoubtedly the most successful and widely adopted script developed by a single man in the last 5 centuries, or since King Sejong the Great created Hangul in Korea in 1443. 6/6
With most minority scripts, almost everything published is sponsored by government agencies or NGOs. What& #39;s really striking about Ol Chiki is how much privately produced vernacular printing there is from small independent publishers - a sign of real and growing grassroots demand.
You can read more about Ol Chiki on @EndangeredAlpha& #39;s excellent Atlas of Endangered Alphabets:
https://www.endangeredalphabets.net/alphabets/ol-chiki-santali/
See">https://www.endangeredalphabets.net/alphabets... also the page on the Ol Chiki script at the portal for Santals website here:
https://wesanthals.tripod.com/id45.html ">https://wesanthals.tripod.com/id45.html...
https://www.endangeredalphabets.net/alphabets/ol-chiki-santali/
See">https://www.endangeredalphabets.net/alphabets... also the page on the Ol Chiki script at the portal for Santals website here:
https://wesanthals.tripod.com/id45.html ">https://wesanthals.tripod.com/id45.html...
Nishaant Choksi explores the deployment of Santali scripts, including Ol Chiki, in Bengali-dominated local markets, the education system and in the circulation of print media. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/graphic-politics-in-eastern-india-9781350159594/">https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/graphi...
