Azad speaking Rohingya

This video of Azad speaking Rohingya was filmed by Kasha Rigby in Camp 4, Rohingya Refugee Camp in Bangladesh. Rohingya, or Ruáingga, is a South Asian language of the Bengali-Assamese branch of the Eastern Indo-Aryan language family. There are approximately 1.8 million Rohingya speakers, most of whom belong to the Rohingya ethnicity, who primarily live in the Rakhine State of Myanmar and follow Islam. In 2013, the United Nations declared the Rohingya people to be one of the world’s most persecuted minorities, as they are denied citizenship in Myanmar in addition to other freedoms, including state education and working in civil service.

The Rohingya language is related to and often compared with Chittagonian, a language of Bangladesh, and the two are mutually intelligible. Despite initially being written in Arabic script, Rohingya now primarily uses the Hanifi Rohingya script, created by Maulana Hanif in 1983. The script was largely based on the Arabic alphabet, in addition to the Latin and Burmese alphabets, and is written from right to left. There are six vowels in the Rohingya language, and accented vowels are used to designate stress. Additionally, Rohingya utilizes 12 verb tenses-- present, past, and future, which are each conjugated for the first, second, and third person.

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