How it began
Thaana is the script of Dhivehi, the language of the Maldives. According to Wikipedia, it first appeared in Maldivian inscriptions in the early 15th century, during the reign of Sultan Nasir al-Din (1409 to 1411), in an early form called Gabulhi Thaana that ran words together without spaces. The earliest surviving inscription, on a gravestone, dates to 1479. The modern form was invented some time before 1705. No inventor is recorded. Oral tradition credits Sultan Muhammad Thakurufaanu with bringing it from the north, but there is no evidence for this. Another account dates the earliest inscriptions to the late 16th century.
Before it existed
Before Thaana, Dhivehi was written in Dhives Akuru, a script related to those used for Tamil, Malayalam and Sinhala in which vowels attach to consonant signs. A move from that script toward Thaana is recorded from the 18th century. Some Thaana letters also go back to the older script, since the local Indic numerals used for nine of its consonants belong to that tradition.
How it works
Thaana has about 24 letters and is written from right to left. The first nine consonants were derived from the Arabic numerals one to nine, and the next nine from the local Indic numerals. Vowels are written with marks taken from Arabic vowel diacritics, and every vowel is written, so the script has features of both an alphabet and an abugida. Further letters were taken from Arabic letters. The letter order follows neither Indic scripts nor Arabic.
How it spread
The unusual letter order has been read as a sign that the script was scrambled to keep it secret. It was first used to write magical incantations, called fandita, and Quranic quotations. Learned Maldivians saw the advantage of the simplified script, which could be mixed with Arabic text, and it was gradually adopted for everyday writing.
Who pushed back
In the mid-1970s the Maldivian government began a short period of Romanization, and a Latin transcription was introduced in 1976. President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom reinstated Thaana shortly after taking power in 1978, although the Latin transcription remains widely used alongside it.
Where it stands today
Thaana is the script in which Dhivehi is written today, in the Maldives and on Minicoy Island in India, by a speech community of around 350,000 people. It has its own code in the ISO 15924 standard for script names and is encoded in Unicode. The Latin transcription of 1976 is still used beside it.
