Rohingya is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Rohingya people of Rakhine State, Myanmar. It is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Bengali–Assamese branch, and is closely related to the Chittagonian language spoken in neighbouring Bangladesh. The Rohingya and Chittagonian languages have a high degree of mutual intelligibility.

The Hanifi Rohingya script is a unified script for the Rohingya language. Rohingya today is written in three scripts, Hanifi, Arabic, and Latin (Rohingyalish). The Rohingya language was first written in the 19th century with a version of the Perso-Arabic script. In 1975, an orthographic Arabic script was developed and approved by the community leaders, based on the Urdu alphabet but with unique innovations to make the script suitable to Rohingya.