Mahl Language - Spoken and Literary Varieties

Spoken and Literary Varieties

Maldivian presents another aspect with which English speakers are not too familiar: the distinction between what is spoken and what is written. Every language that has a written idiom has this distinction to a greater or lesser degree. But Asian languages such as Maldivian seem to exhibit major differences between the two varieties of language.

Spoken Maldivian, for instance, has twenty seven consonants. In contrast, written or literary Maldivian contains these sounds and some Arabic sounds as well. Though these sounds are also used in speaking, their phonetics is not strictly observed. This results in pronouncing it as close as possible to the Maldivian sounds when speaking.

To make things simpler it may be said that every sentence in written Maldivian ends with the addition of ‘ve’, which is never used to end a sentence in spoken Maldivian. In using ‘ve’ a strict word-order also has to be maintained. But in spoken Maldivian word-order is not considered to be very rigid.

One of the very important things one has to take into account in written Maldivian which is not so important in spoken Maldivian is the ‘sukun’, on the letters ‘alif’ and ‘rhaviyani’. ‘Sukun’ in general, is a mark to indicate an abrupt stop on the sound of the letter on which it is placed. However if it comes within the word, the letter is repeated; if it comes on a ‘rhaviyani’ or ‘alif’, at the end of a word, it signifies the sound ‘h’; if it comes on a ‘thaa’, the sound is replaced by ‘iy’. Another thing to note! Though Maldivian has some dialects, these dialects are hardly used in writing. Only Malé Bas and Maliku Bas are used in writing, and both does not show much differences like the rest of the dialects.