Ol Chiki script
Alphabetic script for Santali language, invented in 1925 by Raghunath Murmu and publicised in 1939
The Ol Chiki (ᱚᱞ ᱪᱤᱠᱤ, Santali pronunciation: [ɔl tʃiki], ɔl 'writing', tʃiki 'symbol') script, also known as Ol Chemetʼ (ᱚᱞ ᱪᱮᱢᱮᱫ, ol 'writing', chemetʼ 'learning'), Ol Ciki, Ol, and Santali alphabet is the official writing system for Santali, an Austroasiatic language recognized as an official regional language in India. It was invented by Pandit Raghunath Murmu in 1925. It has 30 letters, the design of which is intended to evoke natural shapes. The script is written from left to right, and has two styles (the print Chapa style and cursive Usara style). Unicode does not maintain a distinction between these two, as is typical for print and cursive variants of a script. In both styles, the script is unicameral (that is, it does not have separate sets of uppercase and lowercase letters).
The shapes of the letters are not arbitrary, but reflect the names for the letters, which are words, usually the names of objects or actions representing conventionalized form in the pictorial shape of the characters.
History
The Ol Chiki script was created in 1925 by Raghunath Murmu for the Santali language, and publicized first in 1939 at a Mayurbhanj State exhibition. Unlike most Indic scripts, Ol Chiki is not an abugida, but is a true alphabet: giving the vowels equal representation with the consonants.
Before the invention of Ol Chiki script, Santali was written in Bangla, Devanagari, Kalinga and Latin script.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Ol Chiki script” as alphabetic script for Santali language, invented in 1925 by Raghunath Murmu and publicised in 1939. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q201688. The Library of Congress control number is sh85094499. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1925 and 1939.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ol Chiki script” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.