Language of the islanders in Southasia: Part 2

Not many people know that the English word "atoll", which describes a coral island with a surrounding reef and a lagoon, is borrowed from Dhivehi, the national language of the Maldives. The original word in Dhivehi is atoḷu. Dhivehi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by approximately half a million people in the Maldives. Beyond the Maldives, Dhivehi is also spoken in Minicoy Island of Lakshadweep, a union territory of India, where it is known as Mahl.

Dhivehi is written in the Thaana script. This unique script came into existence in the 17th century. Thaana uniquely combines the peculiarities of both Brahmi-derived scripts and Perso-Arabic scripts. There are 24 main characters in Thaana, which are consonants, plus 11 vowels depicted as diacritic signs. Like other Brahmi-derived writing systems – such as those of Bengali, Devanagari, Odia, Malayalam, Sinhala, Tamil and more – vowel signs in the Thaana script are combined with a consonant base to form a syllable. For example, the word "divehi", written from right to left in the Thaana script, looks like ދިވެހި, with each consonant character bearing a vowel sign above or below it.