Malé Latin

Dhivehi Latin or Maldivian Latin, known colloquially as Malé Latin or Nasiri Latin, is a Latin Maldivian alphabet briefly mandated in the Maldives from 1976, but the country reverted to the native Tāna and Arabic alphabets in 1978. Maldivian Latin is still widely used in non-academic literature for romanizing Maldivian place names.

Maldivians traditionally used two alphabets simultaneously, the Tāna script for Maldivian and the Arabic script for Arabic. All learned Maldivians were well versed in the Quran and Arabic was the first script they learned in childhood. This was followed by their local script, Tāna, in which there were not many books printed, but that was important for official use. Therefore, the primary knowledge of the letters was called Arabitāna.

Toward the mid-1970s, during President Ibrahim Nasir's tenure, Telex machines were introduced by the Maldivian Government in the local administration. The new telex equipment was viewed as a great progress, however the local Tāna script was deemed to be an obstacle because messages on the telex machines could only be written in the Latin script.

Following this, a Latin transliteration not done by experts in linguistics was swiftly approved by the Maldive government in 1976 and was quickly implemented by the administration. Booklets were printed and dispatched to all atoll and island offices, as well as schools and merchant liners.

This official Latin script has been criticized by several scholars because the transliteration of vowels did not follow the consistency of the Thaana alphabet and was more difficult to master for Maldivian learners. In the Maldivian alphabet there is one single diacritical sign (fili) for 'a' 'e' 'i' and 'u', and this single sign is repeated when the sound is lengthened. In the new romanization only one of the short vowels is consistent with the way of the traditional script "aa", but most long vowels "oo", "ee", "ey" and "oa" are pronounced as in English. However, only a very small group of Maldivians belonging to the elite were familiar with written English in 1977.

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