Ol Onal



The Ol Onal, also known as also known as Bhumij Lipi or Bhumij Onal, is an alphabetic writing system for the Bhumij language. Ol Onal script was created between 1981 and 1992 by Ol Guru Mahendra Nath Sardar. Ol Onal script is used to write the Bhumij language in some parts of West Bengal, Jharkhand, Orissa, and Assam.

Language
Bhumij is a language of the North Munda group of the Austroasiatic languages, spoken mainly in the Indian states of Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal. It is spoken by around 100,000 people in India. The language is closely related to Mundari (mutually intelligible with it but with many dialectal differences), Ho, and Santali.

History
The Bhumij community had no written language, and knowledge was transmitted orally from one generation to another. Later researchers started to use Devanagari, Bengali, and Odia scripts to document the Bhumij language. However, Bhumijs did not have their own script.

The Ol Onal script was created in between 1981 and 1992 by Mahendra Nath Sardar for writing Bhumij in India. It was initially designed by Sardar as a bicameral script, where the lowercase letters were known as Galang Onal, however only the capital letters called Ol Onal have been used for teaching and printed books. Sardar wrote many text books in the script (using only Ol Onal capital letters), but there's no known record of Sardar's Galang Onal lowercase letters (which are very different from the taught capitals) ever being used in publications, except in the script author's personal design manuscripts, with various tried variants that Sardar did not promote for wide use in the Bhumij community.

Structure
Ol Onal is written from left to right and behaves as a regular alphabet, and not like the typical abugidas used for other Indic scripts: the 6 basic vowels and 24 basic consonants are simply written as standalone letters, and the consonants do not have any inherent vowel. So there's no vowel killer (or halant) and no need to form complex clusters or to contextually change the letter forms in ligatures for initial or grouped vowels, and final or grouped consonants. (The Ol Chiki alphabet has a similarly structure).

There are three additional signs (referred to as ṭiḍaḥ): the nasalisation sign mu (or mun arang [˜], a dot diacritic used above vowel letters), the lengthening sign ikir (or ikir arang [ː], a dot diacritic used only below the vowel letter a [ɔ], where it can occur simultaneously with the nasalisation sign mu), and hoddond (a special sign occuring only after the consonant letters ab [b] and uj [ʤ] to indicate glottalisation [ɒ]).

The script also includes ten decimal digits, and an additional abbreviation sign (a small ring above the baseline, at the middle height of letters and digits).

Encoding
Ol Onal has been assigned the block U+1E5D0–1E5FF for encoding in the Unicode version 16.0, announced to be released in September 2024 (its draft specification, is under public review since May 2024 but the encoding has been approved by encoding committees, the review allows early tests and possible minor corrections or ambiguities to be fixed). Only the capital letters have been approved for encoding, the lowercase letters (sometimes with simplified shapes) are considered as variants for handwriting.