Extremist nationalist movements insist the group are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, although the Rohingya say they are native to Rakhine state. Experts say language is part of the issue, with Rohingya speaking a dialect of Bengali understood in Bangladesh’s southeastern Chittagong region, but foreign to the Buddhist majority in Myanmar. The Rohingya had no written script until Hanif – an Islamic scholar who fled Rakhine in an earlier surge of violence – began studying the nuances of the language. “[This] legitimises the struggle of the Rohingya language and its much persecuted people,” said Muhammad Noor, a software engineer who built a computer typeface for Hanifi Rohingya compatible with word processing, but not online usage. Translators Without Borders, a nonprofit providing translation services for charities in crisis zones, said the importance of taking the Rohingya language into the digital realm could not be overstated.

Source: The Guardian December 19, 2017 04:30 UTC