A New Script Is Written.
Centuries of Islamic integration collide with an Indic writing system, and the result is Thaana: a brand-new alphabet written from right to left. Its first nine consonants are quietly ingenious — derived directly from Arabic and Persian numerals — a fusion of two worlds in a single script still used every day in the Maldives.
By the early 18th century, the Maldivian language faced a problem. Arabic vocabulary, Qurʾānic terms and Islamic administrative concepts had saturated everyday Dhivehi for six centuries. The old Indic-descended script, Dhives Akuru, could not comfortably hold both languages side by side.
The solution — likely formalised with the help of the 18th-century scholar Hasan Tājuddīn — was unprecedented. A brand-new alphabet, Thaana, was invented from scratch. It is written from right to left, the opposite of every earlier Maldivian script. Its first nine consonants are derived directly from Arabic and Persian numerals; the remaining letters are built from older indigenous Maldivian numerals. Vowels are marked with diacritics, as in Arabic.
It is, as far as anyone knows, the only major living script in the world whose letter forms are descended from numerals rather than from pictographs or older letters. And it is still the writing system every Maldivian learns in school today.
Continue the timeline.
- Michael Everson, Unicode proposal for the Thaana script (1998)
- Xavier Romero-Frias, The Maldive Islanders (Nova Ethnographia Indica, 1999)
- Wikipedia — Thaana
Two thousand years of history — one extraordinary place to experience it.
The atolls in this story are the islands you can stay on today: private-island resorts and overwater villas, planned by a team that works from inside the Maldives.