Ol Chiki

Ol Chiki is a Unicode block containing the Ol Chiki symbols. It was also called the Ol Cemet' (Santali: ol 'writing', cemet '​ 'learning') script, and it was used for writing the Santali language during the early 20th century. It was created by Raghunath Murmu in 1925.

Santali used to be written with the Latin alphabet. However, since Santali is not an Indo-Aryan language (like most other languages in the south of India), Indic scripts did not have letters for all of Santali's phonemes, especially its stop consonants and vowels, which made it difficult to write the language accurately in an unmodified Indic script.

The detailed analysis was given by Dr. Byomkes Chakrabarti in his 'Comparative Study of Santali and Bengali'. Missionaries (first of all Paul Olaf Bodding, a Norwegian) brought the Latin script, which is better at representing Santali stops, phonemes and nasal sounds with the use of Diacritical marks and accents.

Unlike most Indic scripts, which have been derived from Brahmi, Ol Chiki is not an abugida. When other Indic scripts were driven by consonants, the Ol Chiki vowels are given equal representation with consonants. In addition, it was designed specifically for the language, but it was impossible to aassign one letter to each phoneme because the sixth vowel in Ol Chiki was still problematic.

Ol Chiki has 30 letters, the forms of which are intended to repeat the natural shapes of the letters. This was confirmed by the linguist Norman Zide, who said „The shapes of the letters are not arbitrary, but reflect the names for the letters, which are words, usually the names of objects or actions representing conventionalized form in the pictorial shape of the characters.“ It is written from left to right.