Hanifi Rohingya is one of four scripts used for writing the Rohingya language, spoken by about 1,500,000 people, mostly in Myanmar. There are also significant Rohingya-speaking refugee communities in Bangladesh,KSA,Malaysia,Canada,Australlia,Germany,Turkey and Thailand. The Rohingya language has been written in the Arabic script for over 200 years, during which time it has also been written in Myanmar and a modified Latin script known as Rohingyalish. Around 1960, Rohingya scholars began to see a need for a unique writing system which reflected their own language, and Molana Hanif created the Hanifi Rohingya script. Hanifi Rohingya is an alphabet written from right to left. The shapes of the characters are based on the Arabic script (though the character shapes in Hanifi Rohingya are not contextual as they are in Arabic).