The Maldivian Alphabet

The national language of the Maldives is officially called Dhivehi (ދިވެހި) — a name derived from "dheeb" meaning island in the Indo-Aryan tradition. In English, it is also commonly referred to as Maldivian, which is the standard English exonym for the language. Both names refer to exactly the same language, and they are used interchangeably in academic literature and international contexts.

The language has been the mother tongue of the Maldivian people for over 2,500 years. It is the sole official language of the Republic of Maldives, the sole medium of instruction in Maldivian schools for the foundational years, and the language of all government administration and formal culture. A variety of Dhivehi called Mahl (Maahl) is also spoken on Minicoy Island (Maliku) in the Indian Lakshadweep territory, representing a closely related dialect of the Maldivian speech community.

Maldivian (Dhivehi) is spoken by approximately 340,000 people, virtually all of whom live in the Republic of Maldives. The country has a population of around 500,000–600,000 people, with approximately 340,000 being ethnic Maldivians and native Dhivehi speakers. The remainder of the population consists of migrant workers (primarily from Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka) who do not speak Dhivehi as a first language.

Given the small total population, Maldivian is considered a minor world language by absolute speaker numbers. However, it is the sole official language of an independent sovereign nation and is not endangered — all Maldivians learn and use the language as their primary mode of daily communication. A small additional community of Mahl speakers on Minicoy Island (India) brings the total count slightly higher.

The Thaana script is unique among the world's writing systems in one remarkable way: its letter shapes were created from numerals rather than from an earlier script or pictographic tradition. The first nine native Thaana letters (ހ, ށ, ނ, ރ, ބ, ޅ, ކ, އ, ވ) derive their shapes from the Eastern Arabic (Arabic-Indic) numerals 1–9, while the following nine letters (މ, ފ, ދ, ތ, ލ, ގ, ޏ, ސ, ޑ) derive from the Western Arabic (Hindu-Arabic) numerals 0–8. No other writing system in the world uses numeral shapes as the basis for its alphabet.

A second distinctive feature is that Thaana has no inherent vowel in its consonants. Unlike Devanagari and most other South Asian scripts where consonants carry an inherent /a/ sound, Thaana consonants are "bare" — they must always be accompanied by either a vowel diacritic (fili) or a sukun mark indicating no vowel. This gives Maldivian writing a fully explicit phonemic representation, where every sound is marked in the script.

Maldivian (Dhivehi) is an Indo-Aryan language, placing it in the same broad family as Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Sinhala, and many other South and Central Asian languages. Within Indo-Aryan, Dhivehi is classified in the Insular Indo-Aryan subgroup, which includes only two living languages: Dhivehi itself and Sinhala (spoken in Sri Lanka). These two are the only members of a geographically isolated branch that was carried to the islands of the Indian Ocean approximately 2,500 years ago from the Indian subcontinent.

Both Dhivehi and Sinhala descend from Elu Prakrit, an early Apabhramsha associated with the migration of Indo-Aryan speakers to Sri Lanka. Over millennia the two diverged significantly. Dhivehi was additionally shaped by centuries of contact with Arabic, Persian, Sinhalese, Tamil, Malayalam, and later Portuguese — the Maldives was a crucial waystation on the medieval Indian Ocean trade routes. Despite extensive borrowing, the core grammar of Dhivehi remains firmly Indo-Aryan in character.

The official language of the Republic of Maldives is Dhivehi (Maldivian). This status is enshrined in Article 2 of the 2008 Constitution of the Republic of Maldives. Dhivehi is the sole official language of the country and is used in all government administration, legislation, the judiciary, education, and media. The Maldives does not recognise any co-official language at the national level.

English is widely used in tourism, business, and higher education in the Maldives — the country's economy is heavily dependent on international tourism — but English has no official status. In primary education, Dhivehi is the medium of instruction for the core Maldivian subjects, while English is taught from early primary school as a key language for international communication given the Maldives' outward-looking, ocean-based economy.