Santali (Ol Chiki, India) style guide¶
Apply these local conventions alongside the house voice and localization review. Source acknowledgments are in credits.
Address and terminology¶
Write clear, respectful Santali. The supplied guide uses ᱟᱢ for “you.” Choose forms appropriate to the audience and keep their register consistent. Preserve the actor, object, owner, condition and uncertainty when recasting an English sentence.
This page covers Ol Chiki. Do not substitute Santali in another script without an agreed requirement. Ol Chiki runs left to right and has no uppercase/lowercase distinction. Retained Latin product names and identifiers keep their required case.
The plural marker ᱠᱚ appears in examples such as ᱯᱩᱥᱤ ᱠᱚ. Review number and agreement in the complete phrase rather than attaching it to every noun or acronym. Grammatical animacy is not an English male/female distinction. Do not classify every loanword by a blanket rule or turn a singular person into several people when avoiding a gender assumption.
Script marks and punctuation¶
Keep these Ol Chiki characters distinct from visually similar punctuation. The distinctions follow Unicode's Ol Chiki description.
| Character | Function |
|---|---|
| ᱸ (U+1C78) | Nasalization mark |
| ᱹ (U+1C79) | Vowel modifier shown as a baseline dot |
| ᱺ (U+1C7A) | Separate character combining those two functions |
| ᱻ (U+1C7B) | Relaa, a vowel-length mark |
| ᱼ (U+1C7C) | Phaarkaa, which preserves an ejective consonant before a vowel |
| ᱽ (U+1C7D) | Ahad, which marks deglottalization in final position |
Relaa is not an ASCII tilde used to replace a repeated word. Phaarkaa is not a hyphen to insert or remove during general punctuation cleanup. Preserve these letters in verified spellings. Ol Chiki has independent vowel letters and no combining characters; do not apply a Devanagari mark-removal rule to it.
Use ᱾ (U+1C7E, mucaad) to end prose sentences. ᱿ (U+1C7F, double mucaad) is used in poetry. An ASCII period can be confused with the vowel modifier; it is not the native prose full stop. Preserve it inside literal text such as 4.2 or a filename.
Full-sentence bullets take sentence punctuation; short phrases do not. Apply punctuation to surrounding prose. Keep the distinction between a range and a negative number. If the source says pages 30–52, the target must still end at 52, not 50. Use the conjunction ᱟᱨ in prose; retain & in protected names and literal tokens.
Abbreviations, numbers and dates¶
Abbreviate only when the reader will recognize the result. The supplied UI convention omits final abbreviation dots. Keep familiar forms such as USB, HTML and DNS intact when appropriate; explain unfamiliar terms in Santali. A transcription of letter names is not an explanation. Preserve plurality in the complete message without automatically adding an English s to an acronym.
Ol Chiki digits are ᱐᱑᱒᱓᱔᱕᱖᱗᱘᱙. Use the agreed numeral convention and test the product's locale formatter. Literal identifiers and input values retain their required characters.
Use day–month–year order for ordinary numeric dates, as in 26/03/2025, with a four-digit year where ambiguity matters. Keep the source calendar and precision. A traditional month name is not automatically interchangeable with a Gregorian month that overlaps it; verify the actual date rather than replacing names by season. A month-and-year source must not acquire an invented day.
Keep measurements with their unit, as in 30 cm, 1 h and 20 °C. Unit symbols retain their fixed case and do not take plural endings. The minus in −10 °C is not an en dash. Test percentage spacing separately.
Inclusive and interface review¶
Avoid unnecessary gender labels and stereotypes while preserving relevant roles and ownership. Follow accessible content, and preserve the required interface action. Do not describe a linguistic mark as disposable decoration in screen-reader or punctuation guidance. Test whole count messages, substitutions, font coverage and copy/paste with a proficient Santali reviewer; see scripts and typography.