If you were to walk down the bustling streets of Malé, the capital of the Maldives, and glance up at the street signs, you might be forgiven for thinking you had stumbled into a mathematician’s daydream. To the untrained eye, the local script doesn’t look like letters at all. It looks like a sequence of equations, commas, and algebraic variables strung together in a right-to-left flow.
This is Thaana, the unique writing system of the Dhivehi language. While the Maldives is world-renowned for its turquoise waters and luxury resorts, linguists know it for something entirely different: it is home to one of the world’s most scientifically constructed writing systems. Unlike most alphabets that evolved slowly over millennia from pictographs (like Egyptian hieroglyphs turning into the Latin alphabet), Thaana was deliberately engineered.
The secret behind its distinct geometric aesthetic? The alphabet is largely built from numbers.
To understand Thaana, we must first look at the linguistic landscape of the Maldives. Dhivehi is an Indo-Aryan language, a close cousin to the Sinhala language spoken in Sri Lanka. For centuries, the Maldivians used a script called Dhives Akuru, which functioned similarly to other South Indian scripts and was written from left to right.
However, by the early 18th century, trade and religion began to shift the cultural tides. As the Maldives embraced Islam, the need to read and study the Quran in Arabic became paramount. This created a friction: Arabic is written right-to-left, while the local Dhives Akuru was written left-to-right. Maldivian scholars and officials found themselves constantly mentally switching gears.
Enter Thaana. Appearing around the early 1700s, this “modern” script was created to bridge the gap. It retained the Dhivehi sounds but adopted the right-to-left directionality of Arabic. But the creators needed glyphs—shapes to represent the sounds. Rather than borrowing complex shapes from their neighbors, they did something brilliant: they looked at the number line.
The first tier of the Thaana alphabet is a direct adaptation of Eastern Arabic numerals. The logic is strikingly simple. The creators took the numerals, tweaked their slant or rotation slightly, and assigned them to the sounds.
Here is how the first nine letters of the Thaana alphabet correspond to numerals:
It is important to note that these are based on the Eastern Arabic numerals (used in the Middle East), which differ visually from the “Western” Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3) used in English today. However, the resemblance is still undeniable, lending the script its calculated, distinct appearance.
The creative borrowing didn’t stop at nine. The Dhivehi language has more sounds than that. For the next set of consonants, the creators turned to the local indigenous numeral system (sometimes referred to as Indian numerals or Brahmin numerals) that was used in the Maldives at the time.
By effectively “repurposing” two sets of numbers, the Maldivians created an alphabet that was easy to learn (since people already knew the numbers) and distinct from their neighbors. The remaining few letters required for loan words were created by adding dots (diacritics) to existing letters, similar to how English uses distinct letters but creates variations through combinations.
If the consonants are the numbers, the vowels are the mathematical operators. Thaana functions as an abugida with a twist. Unlike the Latin alphabet where vowels are letters that sit in line with consonants (A, E, I, O, U), Thaana uses diacritics called fili.
These marks appear either above or below the consonant to determine the vowel sound. This system is heavily influenced by the Arabic vowel markers (Tashkeel) but is much more rigorous—in Dhivehi, writing the vowel is mandatory, whereas in everyday Arabic, it is often omitted.
This creates a visual rhythm in the text where every character is sandwiched by markers, contributing to the dense, encoded look of the script.
Why exactly did the Maldives switch to such a scientifically organized script? One popular theory among linguists suggests that Thaana might have originally begun as a cryptography tool—a secret code known as Gabulhi Thaana.
In the politically turbulent times of the 17th and 18th centuries, scholars and royals may have needed a way to communicate that was illegible to Portuguese colonizers or rival factions who understood the older Dhives Akuru. Because Thaana was based on a logical substitution of numbers for sounds, it bears the hallmarks of a constructed cipher. Over time, the utility of the script—specifically its compatibility with Arabic right-to-left reading—popularized it beyond secrecy and into the mainstream.
One might assume that such a unique, geographically isolated script would struggle in the digital era. However, Thaana has shown remarkable resilience. Because it is phonemic (words are spelled exactly as they sound) and constructed with a limited set of base shapes, it adapted relatively well to typewriters and eventually computers.
Today, Thaana is fully supported by Unicode. If you look at the Maldives’ presence online, on their currency (the Rufiyaa), and in government documents, Thaana is front and center. It remains one of the few indigenous scripts of the world that serves as the primary official alphabet for a nation, rather than being relegated to ceremonial status.
For language learners and linguistics enthusiasts, Thaana is a delightful curiosity. It deconstructs the idea that writing systems must evolve organically over thousands of years to be functional. It proves that language can be engineered.
The next time you see a photo of the Maldives, look past the overwater bungalows and zoom in on a boat name or a shop sign. You’ll see a writing system that combines the beauty of Arabic calligraphy with the logic of mathematics—a testament to Maldivian ingenuity that turned numbers into words.
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