The Ol Chiki script, also known as Ol Cemet' ("language of writing"), Ol Ciki, Ol (and sometimes as the Santali alphabet, was created in 1925 by Pandit Raghunath Murmu for the Santali language. Previously, Santali had been written with the Bengali alphabet, Oriya alphabet, or Latin alphabet, on the rare occasions it was written at all. But because Santali is not an Indo-European language (like most other languages in the north of India), Indic scripts didn't have letters for all of Santali's phonemes, especially its stop consonants and vowels, which made writing the language accurately in an unmodified Indic script difficult. Missionaries brought the Latin alphabet, which was better at representing some Santali stops, but vowels were still problematic. Unlike most Indic scripts, which are derived from Brahmi (and possibly originally from the Phoenician abjad, like the Latin alphabet), Ol Chiki is a true alphabet, not an abugida, with vowels given equal representation with consonants. Additionally, because it was designed specifically for the language, one letter could be assigned to each phoneme. 1925 was a common year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar). ... Santali is a language in the Munda subfamily of Austro-Asiatic, related to Ho and Mundari. ... The Bengali script is an Abugida system of writing belonging to the Brahmic family of scripts whose use is associated with the Bengali, Assamese, Manipuri and Sylheti languages. ... Oriya alphabet is used to write the Oriya language. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. ... Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies Indo-European is originally a linguistic term, referring to the Indo-European language family. ... In spoken language, a phoneme is a basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words (i. ... A stop, plosive, or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ... The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas used in South Asia and Southeast Asia. ... The Phoenician alphabet dates from around 1000 BC and is derived from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet. ... An abjad is a type of writing system where there is one symbol per consonantal phoneme, sometimes also called a consonantary. ... An alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. ... An abugida or alphasyllabary is a writing system composed of signs (graphemes) denoting consonants with an inherent following vowel, which are consistently modified to indicate other vowels (or, in some cases, the lack of a vowel). ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ... See also consonance in music. ...

Ol Chiki has 30 letters, the forms of which are intended to evoke natural shapes. Linguist Norman Zide said "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."[1] It is written from left to right. Unfortunately, despite Murmu's efforts, literacy in Santali is still very low, between 10% and 30%. Literacy is the ability to read and write. ...

See also: Santali alphabet (Omniglot), Ol Chiki script