Tradition · Santali alphabet
Ol Chiki script
Also known as Ol Chemet
Ol Chiki, the alphabet created by Pandit Raghunath Murmu in 1925 for the Santali language, is a thirty-letter phonemic script of pictographic origin — ol is to write and chiki is a mark in Santali — and was the first indigenous script developed for any Austroasiatic language of the subcontinent. Its forms derive from objects of the Santal natural and ritual world: nahar for an axe, laha for a crescent, dapa for a jaw. Adopted as the Santali script by the Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal governments through the 1970s and 1990s, Ol Chiki was recognised in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution for Santali (the only Austroasiatic language in the schedule) on 22 December 2003.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Connections (1)
- CreatedPandit Raghunath Murmu
Pandit Raghunath Murmu designed the Ol Chiki alphabet for the Santali language in 1925 at the age of twenty, drawing the thirty letters from the shapes of objects in the Santal natural world — nahar for an axe, laha for a crescent, dapa for a jaw. He wrote more than 150 plays, novels, grammars and primers in the new script, which was adopted as the Santali script by the Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal governments between the 1970s and the 1990s and was recognised in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution for Santali on 22 December 2003 — twenty-one years after Murmu's death.
Sources
Standard reference.
Open Ol Chiki script in the repository →