| Ol Onal script | |
|---|---|
 Bhumij written inOl Onal script | |
| Script type | |
| Creator | Mahendra Nath Sardar |
Period | 1981 to current |
| Direction | Left to Right |
| Region | Odisha,Jharkhand,West Bengal,Assam (India) |
| Languages | Bhumij language |
| ISO 15924 | |
| ISO 15924 | Onao(296), Ol Onal |
| Unicode | |
Unicode alias | Ol Onal |
| U+1E5D0–U+1E5FF | |
| This article containsphonetic transcriptions in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA. For the distinction between[ ],/ / and ⟨ ⟩, seeIPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. | |
TheOl Onal, also known as also known asBhumij Lipi orBhumij Onal, is analphabetic writing system for theBhumij language.[1] Ol Onal script was created between 1981 and 1992 byOl GuruMahendra Nath Sardar. Ol Onal script is used to write the Bhumij language in some parts ofWest Bengal,Jharkhand,Orissa, andAssam.[2][3][4]
Bhumij is a language of the NorthMunda group of theAustroasiatic languages, spoken mainly in the Indian states ofJharkhand,Odisha andWest Bengal. It is spoken by around 100,000 people in India.[5] The language is closely related toMundari (mutually intelligible with it but with many dialectal differences),Ho, andSantali.
TheBhumij community had no written language, and knowledge was transmitted orally from one generation to another. Later researchers started to useDevanagari,Bengali, andOdia scripts to document the Bhumij language. However, Bhumijs did not have their own script.
The Ol Onal script was created in between 1981 and 1992 by Mahendra Nath Sardar for writing Bhumij in India. It was initially designed by Sardar as a bicameral script, where the lowercase letters were known asGalang Onal, however only the capital letters calledOl Onal have been used for teaching and printed books. Sardar wrote many text books in the script (using onlyOl Onal capital letters), but there's no known record of Sardar'sGalang Onal lowercase letters (which are very different from the taught capitals) ever being used in publications, except in the script author's personal design manuscripts, with various tried variants that Sardar did not promote for wide use in the Bhumij community.
Ol Onal is written from left to right and behaves as a regular alphabet, and not like the typical abugidas used for other Indic scripts: the 6 basic vowels and 24 basic consonants are simply written as standalone letters, and the consonants do not have any inherent vowel. So there's no vowel killer (or halant) and no need to form complex clusters or to contextually change the letter forms in ligatures for initial or grouped vowels, and final or grouped consonants. (TheOl Chiki alphabet has a similar structure).
There are three additional signs (referred to asṭiḍaḥ): the nasalisation signmu (ormun arang [˜], a dot diacritic used above vowel letters), the lengthening signikir (orikir arang [ː], a dot diacritic used only below the vowel lettera [ɔ], where it can occur simultaneously with the nasalisation signmu), andhoddond (a special sign occurring only after the consonant lettersab [b] anduj [ʤ] to indicate glottalisation [ɒ]).
The script also includes ten decimal digits, and an additional abbreviation sign (a small ring above the baseline, at the middle height of letters and digits).
Ol Onal was added to theUnicode Standard in September, 2024 with the release of version 16.0.
The Unicode block for Ol Onal is U+1E5D0–U+1E5FF:
| Ol Onal[1][2] Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF) | ||||||||||||||||
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | A | B | C | D | E | F | |
| U+1E5Dx | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| U+1E5Ex | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| U+1E5Fx | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||||
| Notes | ||||||||||||||||
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