Script - Ol Chiki

Ol Chiki is a script created in the 20th century by Pandit Raghunath Murmu specifically for writing the Santali language, an Austroasiatic tongue spoken primarily in eastern India, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Unlike many Indic scripts, Ol Chiki is not derived from Brahmi, and it uses its own unique set of 30 letters, each representing a distinct vowel or consonant sound, with no inherent vowel suppression or conjunct forms, making it a largely phonetic script. The characters are designed to reflect the natural articulation of sounds, with a clear one-to-one correspondence between symbol and phoneme, and the script also includes diacritics for tone and vowel length. It is widely used in education, literature, and official contexts in the Santali-speaking regions, and its Unicode encoding ensures digital preservation and accessibility for the language.