Unicode Demystified

The Thaana Script

Thaana is the name of the alphabet used to write Dhivehi, the language of the Republic of the Maldives, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean south of India.^[8] Dhivehi is related to Sinhala, and the oldest examples of written Dhivehi, dating from around 1200, are written in a script called Evela, based on the Sinhala script of the time (for more on Sinhala, see Chapter 9). The current script, the Gabuli Tana, or simply “Thaana,” developed in the seventeenth century under the influence of the Arabic alphabet. Its alphabet has 24 letters, as shown in Figure 8.3.

^[8] My source for the section on Thaana is James W. Gair and Bruce D. Cain, “Dhivehi Writing,” in The World's Writing Systems, pp. 564–568, supplemented with a couple ...