Old Dhivehi

Old Dhivehi is the earliest attested form of the Maldivian language, recorded in Loamaafaanu in the 12th and 13th centuries CE and various Buddhist texts beginning from the 6th century CE. It is the ancestral form which gave rise to the modern northern dialect of the Dhivehi language. Old dhivehi belongs to Indo-Aryan branch of wider Indo-European language family.

No endonym for the language is known. However the language may have been called "Dhuvesi" or "Dhivesi" meaning "Islander", which has evolved into the endonym for the modern language.

History
Old Dhivehi descends through Proto Dhivehi-Sinhala or Elu spoken in 3rd century BCE. Around 1st century BCE, the unattested Proto-Dhivehi, the direct ancestor to all Maldivian dialects, started to separate from Elu prakrit. Proto-Dhivehi came to be influenced by subcontinental Middle Indo-Aryan dialects and Dravidian languages.

Phonology
Vowel inventory of Old Dhivehi is mostly identical to that of modern dhivehi. Like Sinhala and Dravidian and unlike most Indo-Aryan languages, spoken Old Dhivehi distinguished between long and short forms of [, ] and [, ]. However these were not distinguished in writing.


 * Modern [æː] developed as an independent phoneme from the Old Dhivehi diphthong /ai/.

Old Dhivehi vowel inventory was more limited compared to that of modern dhivehi as [f],[z̪],[d͡ʒ],[t͡ʃ] and [ʃ] did not exist. OIA sibilants had [ʃ] and [ ʂ] merged into [s] prehistorically.

Old Dhivehi consonant clusters /dy/ and /ty/ evolved into later [d͡ʒ] and [t͡ʃ] respectively.

Prenasalized consonants existed in the spoken form of old dhivehi, however were not rendered orthographically.

Modern dhivehi ށ [ʂ~ʃ] is a reflex of OIA and Old Dhivehi [] rather than OIA [ʂ].

Old Dhivehi contrasted between retroflex nasal ޱ and dental nasal ނ.

Old Dhivehi /p/ shifted to /f/ after 17th century

Vowel backing of Old Dhivehi /e/ to /o/ occurred after 13th century.