Rohingya

Rohingya is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by approximately 2.5 million people, primarily the Rohingya people of Myanmar's Rakhine State and the massive refugee diaspora in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and beyond. The Rohingya have been described by the United Nations as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world, and the 2017 military crackdown in Myanmar displaced over 700,000 people, constituting what many nations recognise as genocide.

In Australia, approximately 5,000 Rohingya speakers were recorded in the 2021 Census, though the community has continued to grow through humanitarian resettlement. Communities are concentrated in Melbourne's southeastern suburbs (particularly around Dandenong and Noble Park), Brisbane, Sydney, and regional centres. The Australian Rohingya community is one of the most established globally, having received early humanitarian arrivals from the 2000s onward.

Rohingya is closely related to Chittagonian Bengali, reflecting historical connections with the Chittagong region of present-day Bangladesh. It incorporates significant vocabulary from Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Burmese. Despite these connections, Rohingya is considered a distinct language and is not mutually intelligible with standard Bengali or Burmese.

The language has historically been written in multiple scripts. The Hanifi Rohingya script, developed in the 1980s by Mohammed Hanif, was added to Unicode in 2018. However, many Rohingya speakers also use Arabic script, a modified Latin (Rohingyalish) alphabet, or Burmese script. The lack of a single dominant writing system creates practical challenges for translation and literacy programs. Many Rohingya have had severely disrupted education, limiting literacy in any script.

For Australian service providers, Rohingya language access is critical across settlement, healthcare, education, mental health, and legal services. The community's profound trauma experiences — including violence, displacement, statelessness, and prolonged refugee camp stays — require trauma-informed approaches to all communications. Understanding the Rohingya's stateless status (denied citizenship by Myanmar since 1982) is essential context for service provision.