Japan

Japan School
September 1, 2013

On August 31, 2013, Burmese Rohingya Association in Japan (BRAJ) held an event of Rohingya Language School opening ceremony under the patronage of Education Department. The reformed BRAJ has adopted 5 different departments to work towards the well-being and development of Rohingya community in Japan.

The ceremony was conducted in two different sessions the afternoon session for children and evening session for adult. In the afternoon session 11 Rohingya children and 12 Rohingya gentlemen participated in the evening session.

In the opening ceremony BRAJ General Secretary Mr. Syedul Amin explained about the history of Rohingya Language that Rohingya Language was first written in Arabic script in the year 1650 by Shah Alawal, the great poet of Arakan. Rohingyalish is the literature of the language spoken by Rohingya People of Arakan (Rakhine) State in Myanmar. The first Rohingya Language written was back to 350 years and used Arabic Scripts.Due to the long colonial period under the British rules, Burmese King occupation of Arakan and several internal conflicts the Rohingya literature could not have preserved for the upcoming generation.

And he said “Literature is both the foundation of human knowledge and the record of human experience.” The Rohingya people are lack of education, lack of knowledge and lack of experience it is just because of we are lack of literature. Later he introduced the new formulated Rohingyalish alphabets to the participants and distributed the printed copies of Rohingya Zuban Book 1 pages. All of them wholeheartedly accepted the Rohingyalish as their own language in the form of writing and pledge to learn making classes weekly.

Since then many other scholars have tried to write the Rohingya Language using Arabic, Urdu, Burmese and Hanifi Scripts; the last one being the new invented by Eng. Mohammed Siddique Basu in the year 2000 with an intuitive idea to write Rohingya language using 28 Latin letters only. This new system of Rohingya literature has been recognized by ISO (International Organization for Standardization) on 18th July 2007. ISO assigned unique language code ISO 639-3 “rhg” to the language and listed among the world languages.

BRAJ team said “we are very much grateful and appreciate Eng. Siddique Saab for his noble idea, hard work and contribution for inventing this Rohingyalish for the people of Rohingya and we would like to appeal all Rohingya around the world to accept this language and learn it as soon as possible”.