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TELIKILAAS_GRADE 11_DHIVEHI_Olhunfiluvaidhey Liyun

• National Institute of Education

Telikilaas Grade 11 Dhivehi Radio Drama

Telikilaas - grade 9 - dhivehi - dhekolhah vaahakadhakka liyun.

• Ministry of Education

Telikilaas - Grade 12 - Dhivehi - funding proposal

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އެތަން މިތަނުން ކިޔާލުމަށް

އާދޭސް ކުރާ ހިތްވޭ ރޮމުން (17)

އަނދިރިފަރާތް 25

ލޯ މެރޭ ހިނދު ހީވޭ ގާތުގާ ވާހެން (15)

ހާދަ ދޭ ހިތްވެޔޭ ލޯބިން -1

ހިތާ ފުރާނައިން… (62)

އަންނަންދެން ހުންނާނަން ލޯބިން 49

ޤުރުބާން ވުމީ މިހިތުގެ އުފާ 2 ވަނަ ބައި

ވީމޭ އިންތިޒާރުގައި 7 ވަނަ ބައި.

އެންމެ ފަހުގެ

ވައުދޭ ވެވޭ މީ … 37

އިންސާނެކީމޭ……(ޓެއިލަރ)

ނަން ކަލާގެ މިހިތުގެގައި ފެވިއްޖޭ…49

ނުލިބޭނެހޭ އަލުން އެހީ 8

ފިނި ހިތް 12

ލޯބިން ބަލާލީމާ 2

ތިޔަ ލޯތްބަށް އެދެވޭތީ… 9

ލޯބިން ބުނެލަން……(5)

ޙަޤީޤަތް ހޯދުމޭ 7

ފިނި ހިތް 11

އިންސާފް (ފަނަރަވަނަ ބައި)

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މުވައްޒަފުންގެ ސިފަ

ފަހުގެ ޚަބަރު, ލިޔުންތެރީންގެ ދުވަހާ ގުޅުވައިގެން ބާއްވާ “ފެންޑާ މައުރަޒު 2024” ފަށައިފި.

އަދަބީ ބައެއް މުބާރާތްތަކުގައި ބައިވެރިވުމުގެ މުއްދަތު ޖުލައި 09ވާ އަންގާރަދުވަހު ހަމަވާނެ.

“ބަސް އުފެދުމާއި ނެތި ދިއުން : ބަހަވީ ނަޒަރަކުން” ޑރ. އަޝްރަފް ޢަބްދުއްރަޙީމް.

މިއަދު ފާހަގަކުރާ ދިވެހިރާއްޖޭގެ ޝަހީދުންގެ ދުވަހުގެ ހެޔޮއެދުމާއި ތަހުނިޔާ ހުރިހާ ބޭފުޅުންނަށް އަރިސްކުރަމެވެ.

ބަސްތޫރައަކީ ދިވެހިބަހުގެ އެކެޑަމީން ބޭރު ބަސްބަހުގެ ލަފުޒުތަކަށް ކަނޑައަޅާ ދިވެހި ލަފުޒުތައް ހިމެނޭ ގޮތުން ތައްޔާރުކޮށް ނެރޭ ތޫރައަށްކިޔާ ނަމެވެ.

ސުމޭކު ހިދުމަތް

3014800 ,3028000

English Made Simple

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• 25 February 2024

The Dhivehi Language

Dhivehi , also known as Maldivian, is the official language of the Maldives, an archipelago nation located in the Indian Ocean. It holds a unique position as the only language spoken in the Maldives and is an integral part of the nation’s cultural and historical identity.

Origins and History:

The Dhivehi language has a long and rich history that traces its roots to the Indo-Aryan languages. Linguists suggest that Dhivehi shares its ancestry with Sinhala, the language spoken in Sri Lanka. The influence of Sanskrit, Pali, and Arabic is evident in the language, reflecting the historical interactions and trade connections of the Maldives with neighbouring regions.

Historical records suggest that Dhivehi was written in a script known as Eveyla Akuru , a script derived from the ancient Brahmi script. However, over time, the script underwent transformations, and today, Dhivehi is written in a script called Thaana , which was introduced in the 16th century.

Development and Influences:

The development of the Dhivehi language has been shaped by its unique geographical and cultural context. Being isolated on a series of coral atolls, the Maldives maintained its distinct linguistic identity, although it absorbed influences from trade partners, such as Arabic and Persian.

During the medieval period, Islamic influences played a significant role in shaping the vocabulary of Dhivehi, as well as its literary and cultural expressions. The language adapted and evolved while maintaining its core structure.

Similarities and Differences with Related Languages:

Dhivehi shares linguistic and historical connections with Sinhala, and the two languages exhibit similarities in grammar and vocabulary. However, Dhivehi has also been influenced by Arabic due to the spread of Islam, setting it apart from Sinhala. The language has maintained its uniqueness over the centuries, despite its geographical proximity to other linguistic influences.

Dhivehi does not have significant regional dialectal variations. The language is spoken uniformly across the various atolls of the Maldives, maintaining a high degree of mutual intelligibility.

Number of Speakers and Geographic Distribution:

Dhivehi is spoken by approximately 500,000 people, predominantly in the Maldives. Due to the nature of the Maldives as an archipelagic nation, Dhivehi is the linguistic glue that binds the communities spread across the atolls.

Literary Works:

Dhivehi literature has a rich tradition, with influences from classical Islamic literature and local folklore. The earliest literary works in Dhivehi date back to the medieval period and are often associated with the spread of Islam in the region. Traditional storytelling, poetry, and oral narratives have been integral to the preservation of Dhivehi culture and language.

Syntax: Dhivehi follows a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, which means that the subject comes first, followed by the object and then the verb. For example:

• Raajje gothun libey miadhu kihiney. (Translation: The boy ate the apple.)

Verbs and Verb Conjugations: Dhivehi verbs undergo conjugation based on tense, aspect, and mood. The verb stem remains constant, and affixes are added for conjugation. There are three verb conjugations: present, past, and imperative. For instance:

• Aisa kurun. (Translation: I eat.)
• Aisa kurin. (Translation: I ate.)
• Kuri! (Translation: Eat!)

Verb Tenses: Dhivehi recognizes three primary tenses: present, past, and future. Tense markers are added to the verb stem to indicate the timing of the action. Examples include:

• Aisa kurun. (Present – I eat.)
• Aisa kurin. (Past – I ate.)
• Aisa kuran. (Future – I will eat.)

Cases: Dhivehi employs a system of grammatical cases to indicate the syntactic and semantic roles of nouns within a sentence. Common cases include nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative. For example:

• Miadhu libun. (Nominative – The apple is red.)
• Miadhu libey. (Accusative – I see the apple.)
• Miadhu libaage. (Genitive – The color of the apple.)
• Miadhu libah. (Dative – Give the apple to me.)

Nouns and Articles: Dhivehi nouns do not have gender, but they can be singular or plural. Articles are not used in Dhivehi in the same way as in English. Instead, definiteness is often implied through context. For instance:

• Mas. (Fish – singular)
• Masun. (Fish – plural)

Adjectives: Adjectives in Dhivehi generally follow the noun they modify. Adjective forms do not change based on the gender or number of the noun. Example:

• Farudhee fai. (Big house.)

Negative and Interrogative Sentences: Negation in Dhivehi is typically expressed by adding the word “noon” before the verb. Interrogative sentences often begin with question words or particles. Examples include:

• Miadhu noon libun. (I don’t like apples.)
• Kihiney? (Did he/she eat?)

Example Sentences:

• Dhivehi boli aadhey. (We speak Dhivehi.)
• Raajje gothun libey miadhu kihiney. (The boy ate the apple.)
• Fahun huri. (The sky is blue.)
• Kuriah noon. (It’s not raining.)

In conclusion, the grammatical features of Dhivehi similar with that of other Indic languages including its nearest known relative Sinhala.

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Dhivehi Articles

Dhi-English: Influence of Dhivehi language features on the English narratives of Maldivian ESL learners

• Zahra Mohamed

This qualitative descriptive study explored the influence of Dhivehi, the first language (L1) of the Maldivian students on learning English, their second language (L2). The questions raised in this paper enabled to identify morphological, lexical and syntactic transfer errors present in the narratives written by thirty-three students at secondary level from three schools in Male’, the capital of the Maldives. Transfer Analysis was used to analyze errors present in the English narratives written by Maldivian ESL (English as a Second Language) learners. The analysis uncovered negative transfer of Dhivehi linguistic features in their written English at morphological, lexical, as well as syntactic levels. The findings provide invaluable pedagogical implications for second language learning in the Maldivian context. Thus, it is recommended that ESL teachers as well as curriculum developers in the Maldives take into consideration the possibility of the influence of students’ mother tongue or Dhivehi linguistic features on the process of learning English. 

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ހަތަރު ހާސް އަހަރުވީ މިނިވަން ދިވެހިރާއްޖޭގެ ފަޚްރުވެރި ދިވެހި ޙަޟާރަތާއި އަސްލުތައް ދަސްކޮށް، އެ ކަންކަމުން އިލްހާމު ލިބިގެން، ދިވެހި ޤައުމަށް ހެޔޮއެދި، މުރާލި ހިންމަތްތެރިއަކަށްވުމުގެ ފުރުޞަތު، ދިވެހި ކޮންމެ ކިޔަވާ ކުއްޖަކަށް ލިބެން ޖެހޭނެ ރައީސުލްޖުމްހޫރިއްޔާ ޑރ. މުޙައްމަދު މުޢިއްޒު

ށ އަތޮޅު ކައުންސިލުން އަތޮޅު ފެންވަރުގައި ޤައުމީ ދުވަސް ފާހަގަކުރަނީ

ވަޒީރު އާދަމް ނަޞީރު އިބްރާހީމް ގދ ވާދޫ ކައުންސިލާ ބައްދަލުކުރައްވައިފި., ސްރީ ލަންކާގެ ޤާނޫނު ހަދާ މަޖިލީހުގެ ރައީސް، އޮނަރަބަލް މަހިންދަ ޔަޕަ އަބޭވަރްދަނާދިވެހިރާއްޖޭގެ ޤައުމީ ދާރުލްއާސާރަށް ޒިޔާރަތް ކުރައްވައިފި., ސަގާފަތާއި ތަރިކައިގެ ރޮނގުން މީހުން ތަމްރީން ކުރުމާއި ފަންނީ އެހީތެރިކަން ފޯރުކޮށްދިނުމުގެ ޝައުޤުވެރިކަން ޖަޕާން އެމްބަސީން ފާޅުކޮށްފި., ދިވެހިރާއްޖޭގެ ފަޚުރުވެރި މިނިވަންދުވަހާ ގުޅިގެން ބޭއްވި ޝަރަފުގެ ހިނގާލުން ރައީސްގެ ދެކަނބަލުން ބައްލަވާލައްވައިފި..

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ތަރިކަ ދަތުރު.

ދިވެހި ސަގާފީ ތަރިކަތައް ދާދިވަރުކޮށް ބައްލަވައިލެއްވުމަށް

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ދިވެހިބަހާއި ސަގާފަތާއި ތަރިކައާ ބެހޭ ވުޒާރާ

ޤައުމީ ދާރުލް އާސާރު

މާލެ، ދިވެހިރާއްޖެ

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އީމެއިލް: [email protected]

Introduction References Guide to Transliteration of Dhivehi Abbreviations The Persian and Hindi Alphabet --> [page I] INTRODUCTION Dhivehin ( ދިވެހިން ), Dhivehi Bas ( ދިވެހިބަސް ) and Dhivehi Raajje ( ދިވެހިރާއްޖެ ) , all three are so intricately bound together that we do not know which came first. Was it Dhivehin , the people of the Maldives? Was it Dhivehi Bas , the language of the Maldivians? Or was it the country Dhivehi Raajje , the country organised into a state? We can only surmise. But what we do know with certainty is the well harmonised fusion that exists among all these with the terrain on which Dhivehin live, speaking Dhivehi Bas and organised into the homogeneous state of Dhivehi Raajje. It is the island world of Maldives, now called the Republic of Maldives. We do not know when or where Dhivehi Bas was first spoken or much of its early evolultionary [sic] history. But we do know that today this language is spoken in the Republic of Maldives and in Maliku (Minicoy) where, by a twist of fortunes, it is called Mahal. Taking the geography of the Indian Ocean and the pioneering travels in this earliest known great ocean of the world, we do not hesitate to assign a very early date for the peopling of the Maldives. Even to say that it was several millennia ago may not be far off the mark. The late H. C. P. Bell in his monumental monograph on the Maldives (1940), quoting Albert Gray says: "As to its origin, the race which now inhabits the Maldivian archipelago (as well as Maliku , or Minicoy islands), and which has occupied it from the earliest times of which we have any record, is unquestionably of the same (Aryan) stock as the Sinhalese. This conclusion is borne out by evidence of language, physical traits, tradition, folklore, manners and customs." Every great empire that rose in the Indian Ocean and around it had its share of influence on the Maldives. Some of these influences are visible in different degrees on the cultural polity of the Maldives of today. Dhivehi language is the most notable of these. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan family of languages. Its closest sister is, undoubtedly Sinhala. The geography and the mere course of human interaction of this region makes [sic] this inevitable. Reverting to the late H. C. P. Bell once more, we have the following statement: "At this day it is not open to doubt that the whole Archipelago -- including Maliku (Minicoy) now grouped with the Lakkadives, and no longer owing allegiance to the Sultan of the Maldive Islands -- was occupied, either directly from Ceylon, or, alternatively, about the same time as the B. C. immigration into that Island, by people of Aryan stock and language. This supposition is supported greatly by the close kinship between the Maldivian and Sinhalese languages." (Bell, 1940). The Jataka stories mentions "a thousand islands" which is very likely to be the Maldives. References to the Maldives occur in Ptolemy (c. 150 AD), Moses [page II] Chorenensis (fourth century), Pappas of Alexandria (about the end of the fourth century), Cosmas Indicopleustes (sixth century) and Ammianus Marcellinus (fourth [cen]tury). Hieronymus Palladius of Egypt who died about the year 430 AD speaks of a thousands [sic] islands around Taprobane. Sulaiman the Merchant of Siraf (851 AD) wrote "The third sea is the sea of Harkand (Bay of Bengal). Between this and the sea of Lar (Gujurat) [sic] lie numerous islands. They say their number goes upto [sic] 1,900." Al-Masudi who visited Ceylon in 916 AD states "There are countless number of them [i. e. islands], 2,000 or more exactly 1,900." Fa-Hsien, who visited Sri Lanka in 412-414 AD speaks of small islands on every side of Sri Lanka. The Chinese writer Ma Huan speaks of "some small and narrow liu (dhiv = islands)". From these references we know that even as early as the dates mentioned in them, the islands that we today call the Maldives were known and populated, and therefore must have been expressing and conducting their affairs in a language -- which, surely, would have been none other than Dhivehi. Dhivehi language has had three distinctive periods of writings. The first script was called Eveylaa Akuru (ancient letters). It is not known when this form of writing began. The closeness of its form to the Sinhala script of the period suggests that it was an importation by the pioneering settlers of the Maldives. These letters were used until the reign of Sultana Khadeeja (first accession 1347 AD). A definite move away from the original Buddhism is shown in the writings of Eveylaa Akuru. This is visually illustrated in the Isdhoo and Dhabidhoo Loamaafaanu. A tendency to incorporate Arabic into the writings began possibly from before conversion to Islam. This is seen in these documents. These were written immediately after the official acceptance of Islam, which took many years after its contacts with the population through the extensive trade the Arabs and Persians had throughout the Indian Ocean. The trend to the free use of Arabic, both in meaning and in script, continue[s] even today. This movement away from the original Brahmi based form of writing gradually gave way to the next phase in the evolution of Dhivehi writing, which was Dhives Akuru (island letters). Both a religiously puritan drive and a furiously nationalistic movement helped the process of the evolution of Dhives Akuru. This is suggested even by the name of this script, which has close etymological connections with Dhivehi Raajje , Dhivehi Bas and Dhivehin themselves. This trend continued with a fuelling by the constant harassment [sic] by the South Indians, unbroken in the history of the Maldives. This also paved the way to the development of Dhivehi on its own course, away from the Indian languages. It is obvious from all available historical evidence that this was a tumultuous period in Maldivian history. With the ever looming threat to national independence and ways of life itself, it was imperative that a strong and a [page III] homogenous society with all the elements of nationhood, fitting tight, should take to the stage. One of the identities that the Maldives had to maintain was her language, Dhivehi with a unique system of writing and a distinctive literature. Besides the language we also see this period as the time of the evolution of a distinctive set of customs and traditions that formed the basis of Maldivian life. These were some of the realities that we have to accept in the evolutionary process of Dhivehi Akuru and consequently Dhivehi Bas. Dhivehi is now written in Thaana script. It is not known exactly when this script came into being or who brought it into being. But there are some salient features that indicate that Thaana itself was part of a strong reform movement that had its begin[n]ing after the country was liberated from the Portuguese occupation in 1573. Legend makes us believe that Thaana was first written in the reign of Sultan Ghazi Muhammed Thakurufaanu the Great (1573-1585), and was largely the inventive work of Sheik Muhammed Jamaaludhdheen, the great scholar. It has a vowel system close to Arabic. The first nine letters of Thaana are direct adaptations of Arabic numerals. Like Arabic it is written from right to left instead of left to right as the two former writing systems were. The very consistant [sic] and logical system of pronouncing the consonants in relation to the vowels clearly shows that this was the output of a disciplined [sic] and learned mind, well-versed in the art of writing. The introduction of Thaana as the writing system in the reign of Sultan Muhammed Thakurufaanu the Great (1573-1585) was one of the progressive steps taken by him after the liberation of the country from the Portuguese. It simplified the writing of Dhivehi. It put the writing on a logical footing making it easier to learn and so paving the way for further spreading of knowledge. The earliest Thaana script that survived to the modern times were the letters inscribed on the door posts of the main mosque (Hukuru Miskiy) of Kaditheemu (Shaviayani Atoll). It states the date of the roofing of the mosque. On one side of the frame the date given is 1008 AH (1599 AD) and on the other side the date given as the date of renewal of the roof is 1020 AH (1611 AD). These dates fall within the reigns of Sultan Ibrahim III (1585-1609), the son of Sultan Muhammed Thakurufaanu and Sultan Hussain II (1609-1620). Both these kings were preoccupied with other affairs of state and did not devote much energy to arts and culture. On 16 March 1957, 11 new letters were added to the Thaana writing system. These were modified versions of some existing Thaana letters, which were to replace the Arabic letters then used in writing Thaana. Again a rather more drastic measure was announced on 23 May 1977 by which Dhivehi officially adopted the Latin script. On that day the government announced a system of writing Dhivehi using the Latin script with some adaptations. Along with this two new letters also came into being. [page IV] We know that Dhivehi is a language that had and still has a literary history and form. We know clearly that by 1194 AD Dhivehi had a developed form and a definite script of its very own and a capacity to express intricate legal and official commissions. This is clearly shown in Dhabidhoo Loamaafaanu and Isdhoo Loamaafaanu. Though based on the foundation of Sanskrit, Dhivehi developed with little contact with the languages of India and quite on its own lines. Even though under the suzerain rule of the Chola Empire just prior to the adoption of Islam in 1152 AD, the influence exerted on the language seems to have been minimal and inclined towards Sri Lanka rather than India. But it is a noticeable fact that the northern Maldives did absorb more foreign influence in culture and language than the southern and the central atolls, especially the three southern-most atolls. Maliku (Minicoy) has retained an older stratum of Dhivehi than that spoken in the other northern atolls. The dialect that is spoken in these southern parts and Maliku is found to be closer to the original Dhivehi and contains fewer borrowed or absorbed words from foreign sources. This also can be partly attributed to the isolation these atolls were in before the advent of modern forms of transport and the powerful unifying force of radio broadcasts. It is another noticeable fact that all the island-names, without exception have an old Dhivehi base at their roots, be it in the north, centre or south of the Maldives. No island name did ever take any other form. The etymology of the vast majority of Dhivehi words could be traced to Sinhala Sanskrit and Pali, and they form the oldest strata of Dhivehi going to the pre-Islamic times. This is vividly evident when the terminology of the astrologer and the astronomer are looked into. The names of all the asterisms (Dhivehi: ނަކަތް ) and all the signs of zodiac (Dhivehi: ރާހި ) are examples. Another interesting point noticed is the subtle way the terms of a pre-Islamic system of belief have been turned to something maleficent and retained them in the language of the Muslim Dhivehin. This can be compared to the way the ancient Maldivians covered up and saved the places of worship they used for "another day." Good examples of this are seen in dhevi ( ދެވި ) which for Dhivehin of today is "mythical being capable of moving across the seas, land and other barriers, sometimes visible but more often invisible, helpful or harmful, requiring supplicaction [sic], sacrifice or even rebuke and censure." Another example is naamaroofa ( ނާމަރޫފަ ) "which is the name of a dhevi which comes to land from the sea once every year." Another very interesting word is han'gu ( ހަނގު ) which until very recent times applied to the militia of the Sultan. [The old Dhivehi word was san'gu ( ސަނގު ) ]. I am tempted to believe that this word evolved from the Sinhala saňga , Sanskrit saṃgha and Pali sangha which is a term implying "the community of bhikkhus" in all these languages. When the prevalent religion in the Maldives was Buddhism it was most likely a theocracy, like the many countries where this system still prevail, with the king at the apex of the state organisation and his [page V] helpers were the monks, who upon conversion took on the role of a militia but retained the name -- with a different purpose. In the course of my work I could not help taking note of the many points set down here. Dhivehi though with both the f ( ފ ) and p ( ޕ ) sounds now, has in many cases adopted the Sinhala, Sanskrit and Pali p sounds to an f ( ފ ) sound. This seems to have happened due to the influence of Arabic after the conversion, since in the oldest stratum of the language available to us in the form of the so far deciphered Loamaafaanu contain no f sound. Dhivehi fani ( ފަނި ) meaning worm; maggot, bacteria is paṇu, paṇuvā in Sinhala and prâṇaka in Sanskrit and pāṇaka in Pali. Dhivehi word fen ( ފެން ) meaning water is pän in Sinhala, pānīya in Sanskrit, Pali pānīya and Urdu and Hindi pānī . Another very frequent occurance [sic] is the change of Dhivehi sound s ( ސ ) to h ( ހ ) and vice versa. The word hihoo ( ހިހޫ ) meaning cool, mild, temperate is sisil in Sinhala, ṡītala in Sanskrit and sītala in Pali. Dhivehi word when inflected has the following formations: hihulun ( ހިހުލުން ), hihulaai ( ހިހުލާއި ) etc., which illustrates it more vividly. Again this is seen in the Dhivehi word han ( ހަން ) meaning distress signal given on a boat or an island indicating that urgent help was needed. The Sinhala equivalent is san, sana. In Sanskrit it is saṃ-jñā́ and in Pali it is saññā . Another occurance [sic] was the sound of Dhivehi sound of the letter Shaviyani ( ށ ) changing to a Sinhala ṭ sound. This is seen in the Dhivehi word bashi ( ބަށި ) meaning the egg-plant, aubergine, brinjal, melogene changes to Sinhala baṭu and Sanskrit bhaṇṭākī, bhaṇḍakī. Another example is the Dhivehi verb vashanee ( ވަށަނީ ) meaning to twist, to twine, to twirl; to ball, to make spherical. The Sinhala word is vaṭanavā . The Sanskrit word is vṛit, vártate, vártati and the Pali word is vaṭṭati. The change of sound that I have notices is the Dhivehi dh ( ދ ) to Sinhala y sound in words such as dhanthura ( ދަންޠުރަ ) meaning contraption, apparatus, artifice, mechanical contrivance, trap, ambush to Sinhala yantara, yantaraya, yantare; Sanskrit yantara and Pali yanta. Again, the same sound is seen changed in Dhivehi word dhathuru ( ދަތުރު ) meaning journey, excursion, expedition, odyssey, travel, trip, tour, voyage. In Sinhala it is yatura; in Sanskrit yātrā and in Pali yātrā. Dhivehi has four nasal sounds. They have always come before the following sounds: b ( ބ ), dh ( ދ ) , g ( ގ ) and d ( ޑ ) . All these sounds have their equivalents in Sinhala. In transliteration I have followed the official version that was announced on 23 May 1977. These come with b ( ބ ) sound in such words as an'bu ( އަނބު ) meaning mango. In Sinhala it is am̌ba; in Sanskrit āmra and in Pali amba. The nasal sound is also combined with dh ( ދ ) as in han'dhu ( ހަނދު ) meaning the moon. In Sinhala it is haňda, saňda; in Sanskrit it is candra and in Pali it is canda. The nasal sound is also combined with g ( ގ ) as in ban'gu ( ބަނގު ) meaning intoxicant, drug, narcotic. In Sinhala it is [page VI] baňga; in Sanskrit it is bhaṅgā; and in Pali it is bhanga. The other nasal sound in Dhivehi is that which comes with d ( ޑ ) as in gan'du ( ގަނޑު ) meaning an abscess, carbuncle. In Sinhala it is gaḍu, gaḍuva; in Sanskrit it is gaṇda and in Pali it is gaṇḍa. In some Dhivehi words when they are in the stem form the last letter is latent and when inflected this letter is seen and the etymology is found readily. One such case are words like han ( ހަން ) meaning skin, hide, leather; baloon [sic]. When inflected it is hamaai ( ހަމާއި ), hamun ( ހަމުން ) etc. In Sinhala it is ham, sam, han, hama; in Sanskrit it is cárman and in Pali camma; and gan ( ގަން ) meaning island, village, hamlet; domicile; which when inflected would b e gamaai ( ގަމާއި ), gamun ( ގަމުން ) etc. In Sinhala it is gam, gama ; in Sanskrit it is grā́ma and in Pali gāma . Other examples are words like maa ( މާ ) meaning flower, bloom [in Fua Mulaku this is pronounced as mal ( މަގް ) ] and baa ( ބާ ) gap, cavity, hollow, hole. When inflected these become malaai ( މަލާއި ), malun ( މަލުން ) etc., meaning flower. In Sinhala it is mal, mala; in Sanskrit it is mālā andin Pali mālā. Similarly, baa ( ބާ ) would be balaai ( ބަލާއި ) balun ( ބަލުން ) etc. In Sinhala it is bila; in Sanskrit bila, vila and in Pali bila. Another example is found in words like niboo ( ނިބޫ ) meaning twin and nagoo ( ނަގޫ ) [in Fua Mulaku this is pronounced as nagul ( ނަގުލް ) ] meaning tail. Niboo ( ނިބޫ ) when inflected would be nibulaai ( ނިބުލާއި ), nibuleh ( ނިބުލެއް ) etc. In Sinhala it is nim̌bul, nim̌bullu. Similarly, nagoo ( ނަގޫ ) when inflected would be nagulaai ( ނަގުލާއި ), nagulun ( ނަގުލުން ) etc. In Sinhala it is nagula, nagul; in Sanskrit is is [sic] lāṅgūla and in Pali naṅgula, laṅgula. Another instance of this type is the th ( ތ ) with a sukun ( ް ) at the end of words such as aiy ( އަތް ) and faiy ( ފަތް ) . The word aiy ( އަތް ) meaning hand, palm; side, direction, when inflected would be athun ( އަތުން ), athaai ( އަތާއި ) etc. In Sinhala it is at, ata, hata; in Sanskrit it is hásta and in Pali it is hattha. Similarly, faiy ( ފަތް ) meaning leaf, palm (of plants and trees); official proclamation, missive, epistle, deed (all these were written on leaves at one time); feather, would be fathaai ( ފަތާއި ), fathun ( ފަތުން ) etc. In Sinhala it is pat, pata; in Sanskrit it is pattra; in Pali patta and in Urdu pati. Arabic came into Dhivehi en masse for religious purposes after the adoption of Islam, mainly for the expressions used in religious phraseology. At the same time it may be noted that quite a number of Dhivehi words were given up and Arabic, Persian or Urdu words substituted by some who held the view that these Dhivehi words did not convey the meaning that they desired or who simply did not know Dhivehi proper. But the constant contact with Arab and Persian traders of the Indian Ocean allowed some words of a non-religious nature also to come into the language. This is seen in the adoption of many words in the field of navigation and shipping. The inclusion of adopted Arabic words such as kan'dhili ( ކަނދިލި ) in the Isdhoo Loamaafaanu gives us clues on when these words came into Dhivehi. It is evident from Isdhoo Loamaafaanu that Persian words were used in that early times in Islamic religious contexts frequently. For in that document the words roada ( ރޯދަ ) and namaadhu ( ނަމާދު ) appear [page VII] distinctly and in their Persian meanings. It is surprising to note that the equivalents of these in Arabic seems [sic] to have never been in use. Dhivehi being a language spoken by a small group of people, scattered over a wide geographical area, and all those who spoke Dhivehi following one religion, it did not have a 'reserve' of its linguistic treasures expressed or recorded in a different perspective in the past nine centuries or more. But we know from the Loamaafaanu and the remnants of some material in the language itself that in its long history Dhivehi has made an attempt to preserve these in a significant way. This goes a long way to show the adaptability and resilience of Dhivehi itself, if not to say the conservative nature of Dhivehi and Dhivehin themselves. This is more so when the all[-]pervading puritan nature of the new religion Dhivehin adopted is taken into account, and when it comes to light that the custodians of the linguistic heritage turnout to be the innovators themselves. Dhivehi has a few words that have a Portuguese etymological base. The great majority of these came through Sinhala, or a Sinhala equivalent could be found. Dhivehi words paan ( ޕާން ) (bread), feyru ( ފޭރު ) (guava), alavangu ( އަލަވަންގު ) (crowbar, handspike) and alamaari ( އަލަމާރި ) (almirah, cabinet, cupboard) are examples. These correspond to Sinhala pān., pāṇ (bread), pēra (guava) alavaṇguva (crowbar) and almāri, almāriya (almirah) Urdu & Hindi almārī (a chest of drawers, a book-case, a cabinet). These in turn could be traced to Portuguese pāo (bread), pêra (pear), alavanca (lever , crowbar) and armário (cupboard, cabinet, chest). The most striking and only instance of a direct adaptation from Portuguese that I came across is the word miskiy ( މިސްކތް ) which in Portuguese is mesquita. In its inflections ( މިސްކިތާއި‘ މިސްކިތުން‘ މިސްކިތުގެ ) the relationship is more vividly seen. This word seems to have appeared in documents after the short stint of Portuguese rule (1558-1573) in the Maldives. The word used by the Maldivians before in this context was dhanaaru ( ދަނާރު ) and in some older documents (Isdhoo Loamaafaanu - 1194) the Arabic word masjid in its Dhivehi variations such as masdhidu ( މަސްދިޑު ) were used. There are a few words with Dutch roots in Dhivehi. Almost all of these came through Sinhala. Dhivehi words boaku ( ބޯކު ) (arch, span), foanchu ( ފޯންޗު ) (teapot) and sulufu ( ސުލުފު ) (sloop) are examples. These correspond to Sinhala bōkku, bōkkuva (arch); pōchchi, pōchchiya (jug) and suluppu, suluppuva (sloop) respectively. These in turm [sic] could be traced to Dutch boog (arch), potje (pot) and sloep (sloop). Though in general Dhivehi developed isolated from the Indian languages, there are many Urdu words and derivatives in Dhivehi. Most of these are of an intellectual nature. This could be attributed to the fact that the language of the Muslims of much of the Indian sub-continent has been Urdu and the few Maldivians who studied religion [page VIII] there did so through the medium of Urdu. There are some Hindi words too. But these are generally from a trader's or a sailor's vocabulary, where ever they are not common with Urdu. So are many words from various other Indian languages of the co[a]stal regions of South India, such as Bengal. These were the regions with which Maldives had traditional trading links and the majority of these words have come into Dhivehi in the last two centuries. For the one and half centuries of frequent contact with the Borahs brought in many words from their tongues, especially after they were given permission to set up their shops in Male' in 1857. It is surprising to note that some English words in Dhivehi are not very modern adaptations. Words like thafureelu ( ތަފުރީލު ) meaning taffrail (of a vessel), iskaraabu ( އަސްކަރާބު ) meaning scraper, drawknife, drawshave, spokeshave; and manavaru ( މަނަވަރު ) meanin[g] man-of-war, warship, battle ship, are not very new. But there is one common thread running in all such adoptaions [sic], i. e. they all come in the fields of ships and shipping. We know that in the year 1836 Sultan Muhammed Imaadhudhdheen IV sent his officers and shipwrights to Bengal to learn this trade from the English who were there then. There are a few words in Dhivehi the etymology of which could be traced to Tamil, such as aveli ( އަވެލި ) meaning beaten rice, flaked rice and fataas ( ފަޓާސް ) cracker, firecracker, squib. There are also Tamil words that has come to Dhivehi through Sinhala or which are shared by both Dhivehi and Sinhala with a Tamil root. Examples are Dhivehi aadaththoda ( އާޑައްތޮޑަ ) meaning Malabar nut (Adhathoda vasica), Sinhala ādathoda , Tamil ādathodai and Dhivehi fan'gu ( ފަނގު ) meaning share or division of cultivated land, Sinhala paňgu Tamil pangu. The number being so few surprises me. For the vernacular of Sri Lankan Muslims being Tamil and the age-old common factors to them through the common religion of Islam and the close proximity and contacts did not make the Maldivians borrow more, especially in the phraseology of faith. There is a sprinkling of words of Malay origin in Dhivehi such as kanbalhi ( ކަންބަލި ) meaning sheep, ram, ewe, lamb and kiris ( ކިރިސް ) meaning dagger, dirk, kris. There are also some words that has come to Dhivehi thro[u]gh Sinhala or which are shared by both Dhivehi and Sinhala with a Malay roots. Examples are gnamgnam ( ޏަމްޏަމް ) meaning the tree and fruit of Cynometra cauliflora , Sinhala namnam Malay namnam and gudhan ( ގުދަން ) meaning store, godown, warehouse, Sinhala gudan , gudama Malay gudang. In the case of direct links with Malay it is easily understood when the strong trade links that existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are taken into account. Though there always were links between Maldives and the East Indies and Malay peninsula the links were very strong in the period mentioned. This [page IX] was especially so with the Acheh (Dhivehi: އަސޭކަރަ ) According to one theory the people of East Indian origin who crossed the Indian Ocean to Madagascar made the Maldives their mid-way station on these long voyages. It may also be mentioned here that there are many words which Dhivehi share with Malay which both languages got through Arabic and Sanskrit. The long history of the Dhivehi language has seen many teachers who made contributions towards its development and the foundation of its grammar. But this long history is lost in the mists of time. We have only the comparatively recent works available to us. The earliest and foremost of them are the works of the great master Edhur Umar Maafaiy Thakurufaanu. The greatest of his extant works is Bodu Thaaheedu ( ބޮޑު ތާހީދު ). This is a poetical composition consisting of 398 verses and lays down the rules of poetical form and the grammar of the language. It was composed in 1150 AH (1737-38 AD). He was followed by another great poet, Badeyri Hassan Manikufaanu, among whose extant great works are the two poems Dhekunu Arumaadhu ( ދެކުނުއަ ރުމާދު ) and Dhioage Raivaru ( ދިޔޯގެ ރައިވަރު ). Besides revealing his poetical skill and linguistic mastery he also gives us in this the grammatical of the language. He was born in 1745 AD in Addu Atoll. For most of his life be lived in Male' and was among the courtiers of Sultan Muhammed Mu'eenudhdheen I (1799-1835 AD). He died on the island of his birth on 4 April 1807. The next great figure in this field was Sheik Muhammed Jamaludhdheen who was popularly known by the name Naibu Thuththu. He was the son of Easa Naibu Thakurufaanu of Fua Mulaku. Easa Naibu Thakurufaanu was a senior judge between 1787 and 1831. When Sheik Jamaaludhdheen was yet a young child his father died. His mother, Mariyam Fulhu married Naib Ahmed Manikufaanu who was a senior legal figure and a pundit of the Dhivehi language and functioned as acting Chief Justice in 1831. It was young Jamaaludhdheen's step-father who was his first teacher. Later the young scholar went to Sri Lanka and studied at Beruwela. He returned to Male' in 1883. In 1886 he travelled to Mecca on Hajj pilgrimage and spent some time studying under the famous scholars there. In 1886 he was appointed the acting Chief Justice but within a short period of time was banished to Fehendhoo (in Baa Atoll) in a political upheaval in Male'. It was here on the island of Fehendhoo that he wrote his book on the grammar of Dhivehi which was published 24 years after it was written and long after the author's death. He was re-instated as the Chief Justice in the reign of Sultan Imaadhudhdheen VI (1893-1903), but within about a year of his being appointed he gave up the high office and functioned as a senior assistant judge. In 1903 Sheik Jamaludhdheen was again banished in another change in the office of the Sultan. This time it was to the island of Maa-eboodhoo (in Dhaalu Atoll) and died there on 29 October 1907. Besides his grammar of Dhivehi there are many of his works in the fields of religious teachings and poetry among us today. Sheik Jamaaludhdheen's [page X] pupil and disciple was Sheik Hussain Salaahudhdheen. He was the son of Bodugaluge Moosa Didi and was born in Male' on 11 May 1881. At the young age of 18 years he was appointed a senior assistant to the Chief Justice in the reign of Sultan Muhammed Imaadhudhdheen VI (1893-1903). He was appointed Chief Justice on 17 December 1927 and held that post until the poroclamation [sic] of the first written constitution of the Maldives on 22 December 1932, when he was appointed the Minister of Justice. He was appointed the Chief Justice again on 11 April 1936 and held the high office until his death in Colombo on 20 September 1948. When Majeedhiyya School was opened on 20 April 1927, he was appointed the principal. Besides being an eminent Islamic scholar and the leading legal figure of his day, he gave much to Dhivehi language. His compilation of the Holy Prophet's biography in three volumes stands as a lasting memorial to his learning and scholarship. It is also testimony to his [in]fluence and forceful expression in the Dhivehi in its classic form. He has been the most prolific writer in the Dhivehi language. It was he who penned the following lines, which clearly shows the depth of his knowledge of the etymological basis of the language. ފުރައަމެންގޭ މާދަރީބަސް އެކުވެގެންވެއެ އުފެދިގެން " ކުރެވިދާ ހިނދު ފިކުރުގިނަބަސް އެކުވެގެން ޝަރްގަށް މިވާ ސެންސިކިރްތާ‘ ޕާލިޔާ‘ ސިންހަޅަ‘ ތަމަޅަ ފެނެޔޭ ނިކަން ފެންނަހެން ޢަރަބީގެ ބަސްތައް ފާރިސީއާ ޕޮސްތުވާ ހަމަ އެފަދައިން ހުރެދެޔޭ ޔޫރަޕްގެ ބަސްތައްވެސް ލިބޭން " ނަމަބަލައިހޯދައި އުޅެފި ކަތަކަށް ރަނގަޅު ހަމަ ބުއްދިވާ "Our mother tongue as it evolved and alloyed [Took to it] languages of the east as seen when studied Sanskrit, Pali, Sinhala, Tamil are seen evidently Words from Arabic, Persian and Pushtu are perceived plainly At hand are words from European languages too If searched by a person of rational thinking." The greatest Dhivehi poet of modern times was Sheik Hussain Afeefudhdheen. He was the son of Sayydh Muhammed and was born in Male' on 19 May 1888. A student of Sheik Hussain Salahudhdheen, he soon became his star-pupil, especially in the field of Dhivehi. He was appointed the Chief Justice on 2 August 1933 and later became the Minister of Education on 30 January 1937. He was a member of many panels that worked on Dhivehi language. He was the author of a book on the Dhives Akuru writing system. He transliterated many old Dhives Akuru writings to modern Thaana. He passed away in Male' on 2 June 1970. The late Muhammed Amin Didi, [page XI] the President of the First Republic of the Maldives ushered in a period of complete change in Dhivehi literature. It was he who began teaching of Dhivehi as a subject in Maldivian schools. It was also he who pioneered the modern forms of writing, both in prose and poetry. His charismatic efforts changed the language in its every aspect and set the course to its development on modern lines. He must also be remembered for the contributions he made to the grammar of the language in his book Dhivehi Bas - Dharivarunge Eheetheriyaa ( ދިވެހިބަސްދަރިވަރުންގެއެހީތެރިޔާ ) . It was he under whose leadership began the compilation of the first ever Dhivehi dictionary, which today we have as Dhivehi Basfoiy ( ދިވެހިބަސްފޮތް ) in its ma[n]y volumes, by appointing a committee for this purpose on 11 July 1946. It was also he who awakened the country into the modern world and re-kindled Maldivian nationalism. He died on the island of Vihamanaafushi (now the tourist resort Kurumba Village) on 19 January 1954. Sheik Ibrahim Rushdhi rendered great services to education in general and to Dhivehi language in particular. He was born on Kelaa island (Haa-Alif Atoll) on 15 October 1897 and had his education at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. His most valuable contribution was his grammar of Dhivehi, Sullamul Areeb ( ސުއްލަމުލް އަރީބް ). Though rarely seen now, this is one of the fundamental books on Dhivehi grammar. He died in Male' on 29 October 1961. Another great personality who rendered valuable service to Dhivehi was Sheik Malim Moosa Maafaiy Kaleygefaanu, who was born in Male' on 10 June 1883. A man of great learning and much hard work, his greatest contributions were the two lexicons Al Eagaaz’ Fee Tha'uleemu Alfaaz' ( ފީތައްލީމުލްއަލްފާޡް ) and Dhivehi Bahuge Ran Thari ( ހަލްފާޡްފީތައްލީމުލް ). two contained a[n] Arabic-Dhivehi and Dhivehi-Arabic vocabulary and some sentences. This compilation contains some of the old words of Dhivehi and their equivalents in Arabic. The latter was a dictionary of the Dhivehi language. In this book he gives a number of Dhivehi words in sentences and by this illustrates their meanings. He died in Male' on 18 November 1970. The last great teacher of Dhivehi in terms of chronology was Sheik Muhammed Jameel. He was born to a distinguished family of scholars in Male' on 14 May 1915 and was appointed the Chief Justice on 2 January 1958. He contributed to Dhivehi, its literature, poetry and to Islamic learning in the Maldives in abundant measure. His books on religious studies still remain the most popular and simple to understand texts by the common man. His poetry became legendary in his lifetime for the eloquence of expression and profundity of thought. His plays, short stories and many essays on various branches of Dhivehi are among the most erudite on the subject. He passed away at the age of 74 years on 15 March 1989 in Male'. There are many non-Maldivians who rendered great services to Dhivehi language. Pioneering work in this field was done by François Pyrard de Laval. He was shipwrecked in the Maldives in July 1602 and lived there till he set sail to Bengal in [page XII] 1607. In his account of the Maldives of his day a very full description of what he saw is given. He also mentions many Dhivehi words and their meanings, though it is difficult to recognise them now as he was pronouncing these in his native Fre[n]ch , accent. A vocabulary is also given. A valuable study of Dhivehi language and the script then used is given in "Vocabulary of the Maldivian language" [Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1st series) Vol. 6 (1840-41)] by Lieut. W. Christopher who was one of the two [the other being Lieut. I. A. Young] British (Indian) Navy officers who were in the Maldives on a surveying expedition in 1835. According to Dhivehi Thaareekh ( ދިވެހިތާރީޚް ) "after that [i. e. their arrival] the two persons who stayed in Male' and the others who were with them endeavoured to learn the language spoken now and spoken earlier by the people of this country. The way they tried [to do this was] to go to the cemet[e]ries within the mosque [compounds] and copying on paper the inscriptions on tomb-stones. They showed these to people. Some people read these for them, others did not." Modern research of Dhivehi may very well be attributed to Prof. Wilhem Geiger. In his monumental work on Dhivehi language "Maldivian Linguistic Studies" [Journal of the Ceylon Branch of The Royal Asiatic Society, 1919, Vol. XXVII - Extra Number] stands out as the first scientific study of the language. Three learned papers, titled Máldivsche Studien I, II, III (in Sitzungsberichte der Kgl. Bayer, Akademie der Wissenchaften of Munich pp 107-132, 371-387 and 641-684 with one plate headed Màldivsche Alphabete) were translated by Mrs. J. C. Willis and edited by Mr. H. C. P. Bell was published, as mentioned above in 1919. Albert Gray’s works on the Maldives, though not of a linguistic nature altogether, contain some useful information of the periods on which he wrote and some expl[a]nations of older writings. His major work was "The voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies , the Maldives , the Moluccas and Brazil." This was published by The Hakluyt Society in 1887-89 in London. The other important work by the same author was "The Maldive Islands: with a vocabulary taken from François Pyrard de Laval, 1602-1607” in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, (new series) Vol. 10 (1878). The late Mr. H. C. P. Bell rendered much service to Dhivehi. But his services in this field are vastly overshadowed by what he did in the fields of Maldivian history and archaeology. Besides his valuable three monographs (1883, 1921 & 1940), the many articles that appeared in the Journal of The Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch are testimony to this. Special mention must be made of the series "Excerpta Maldiviana" which appeared in the abovesaid journal from 1922 to 1935. These are mines of information for any student of the Dhivehi language and taken for their linguistic and historical value they are rarely surpassed. The three papers of M. W. Sugathapala de Silva enlighten us in more than one aspect of Dhivehi. His first paper "The phonological efficiency of the Maldivian writing system" appeared in Anthropological Linguistics Vol. 11, No. 7 (Bombay, October 1969). The second [page XIII] paper was " Some observations on the history of Maldivian" which appeared in Transactions of the Philological Society of Great Britain (1970) and the third paper was " Some affinities between Sinhalese and Maldivian " which appeared in Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Roayal [sic] Asiatic Society, (New Series) Vol. XIV (Colombo, 1870). Prof. C. H. B. Reynolds contributed much to Dhivehi studies. His connections with the Maldives from 1967 and his study of the language made him one of the few western scholars of the language. Among his writings are "Buddhism and the Maldivian language" (In: Buddhist studies in honour of I. B. Horner, edited by L. Cousins, A. Kunst, K. R. Norman. Dordrecht, the Netherlands, Reidel, 1974) and "Linguistic strands in the Maldives." (Contributions to Asian Studies, Vo. II; 'Language and civilization change in South Asia', edited by C. Maloney, Leyden 1978). The most substantial and the latest work on Dhivehi is the "Historical and Linguistic Survey of Divehi. " This is a work carried out by a team of scholars under the auspices of the University of Colombo. It dealt with among other aspects (1) a study of the origin and development of Dhivehi and determined the genetic affinity with Sinhala; (2) the evolution of Dhivehi and the impact of other languages on it; and (3) record and analyse the dialectological variations in Dhivehi. The team who worked on this project was lead [sic] by Prof. Stanley Wijesundara, the Vice-Chanceller [sic] of the University of Colombo. Other members of the team were, Prof. G. D. Wijayawardhana, Prof. J. B. Disanayaka, Mr. Hassan Ahmed Maniku and Mr. Mohammed Luthfie. The final report of this project was submitted in 1988 and it is yet to be published. The two Loamaafaanu so far read and partly evaluated throw some light on the oldest strata of Dhivehi language. The first to be published was the Dhabidhoo Loamaafaanu published by the National Centre for Linguistic and Historical Studies, Male' in 1982. Work on this was done by Prof. G. D. Wijayawardhana, Prof. J. B. Disanayaka and H. A. Maniku. The other Loamaafaanu which has been read so far is the Isdhoo Loamaafaanu which was published in Colombo by the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka in 1986. This work which was done by Prof. G. D. Wijayawardhana and H. A. Maniku. Bell speaks about a number of Loamaafaanu (Bell 1940) and goes to transliterate and tra[n]slate on of them, the Bodugalu Miskit Loamaafaanu , which he dates to 1356-57. [This same work appeared in the Journal of The Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch Vol: XXXI, No: 83, Parts I., II., Ill & IV in 1930]. Of late very useful work on Dhivehi has been done by Bruce D. Cain. One of his works, "Maldivian Prototypical Passives and Related Constructions" appeared in Anthropological Linguistics, (Vol. 37, No. 4, 1995) and his other work which is his dissertation for a doctorate titled "Dhivehi (Maldivian): A Synchronic and Diachronic Study " has not been published yet. While doing field work in connection with the abovementioned "Historical and Linguistic Survey of Divehi", it was thought that work should be started on a [page XIV] vocabulary of Dhivehi etymology. If I remember correctly, it was in Fua Mulaku and the date was the third of January 1987. Prof. Wijayawardhana, Prof. Dissanaya and I were discussing the meaning and place of han ( ހަން ) [meaning: distress signal given on a boat or an island indicating that urgent help was needed] in the life of Maldivians. From this discussion sprang the idea of a project of this nature. Upon returning to Colombo work began -- at a very slow pace. Whenever I happened to be in Colombo work went on. I had a card index system and notes on these were made by the three of us, intermittently. Several hundred cards were filled and filed. But in 1995, it so happened that Destiny decreed a longer sojourn for me in Colombo and work was started in earnest. With the help of a personal computer and relevant programmes, work was made easier, faster and more accurate. Even with all these modern technology it took me over five years to complete this. It was hard work and accuracy was of utmost importance. References were many and copying them faithfully with all the diacritical marks were not the easiest tasks on earth. After every entry I had to check and re-check. Dhivehi entries had to be done -- in the opposite direction. After all these I now have the completed version on hand. Complete as much as I could do it. Deep as much as I could fathom. As it is now I do not claim an entry for every Dhivehi word. This work is as incomplete as one may think it is, at the same time it is as complete as one thought it fit to be. As far as I am aware it is the first and only attempt by a Maldivian in this field so far. It is a Maldivian's portrayal of his mother tongue. It is the insight a Maldivian has into his language as spoken and understood by Maldivians. In this work I have used the established transliteration rules prevailing in the Maldives. Along with every major entry I have also inserted the Dhivehi word in Thaana script so that the precise word is available for those who read Thaana. Before concluding I must thank the two distinguished scholars who helped me and encouraged me to carry on with this work. Their guidance, pushing and prodding kept me going. It was Prof. G. D. Wijayawardhana and Prof. J. B. Disanayaka of University of Colombo who must be thanked at every step on the way to completion of this work. It is a great pleasure for me to thank The Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka for the offer of publishing this work under its esteemed auspices. The Royal Asiatic Society has been the pioneer in the field of Maldivian studies for the last one and quarter centuries. As far as I am aware this society has published the largest volume of work on the Maldives, some of which today we see in reprints. This alone goes to show the scholarly value of these works and the demand that there exists for the valuable publications of the Society. It is to the Society that we have thank for the monumental [page XV] works of the late H. C. P. Bell, Sir Albert Gray, Prof. Wilhelm Geiger and many more on the Maldives. އަސަރަކާ އަދި ފޮނިކަމެއް‘ އެކި ބަސްބަހުން ހަމަ ފެނުނަކަސް‘ " " އަސަރުގަދަ އަދި އެންމެ ފޮނިބަހަކީ‘ މަށަށް މި ދިވެހިބަހޭ‘ - މުޙައްމަދު އަމީން - "Though impressiveness and sweetness are seen in various languages Forceful in impression and sweetest language for me is this Dhivehi language. " -Muhammed Amin- I dedicate this work to my family, especially to the three loving grand children, Hassan, Muhammed and Ibrahim. To them all for their understanding and for affording me a great life full of happiness and fulfilment. To the three younger ones for their love shown in abundant measure and for the grand opportunity of giving all the rest of us a zest for life and confidence in a future. Hassan Ahmed Maniku, 9 September 2000. Colombo, Sri Lanka. [page XVI] REFERENCES In the course of working on this introduction and the main body of this book I had recourse to the following books. Many computer software material available in the open market including dictionaries, encyclopaedias and language programmes were consulted. They were too many and varied to be named here. AMIN DIDI, Muhammed Dhivehi Bas Dharivarunge Eheetheriyaa, ‘ ދިވެހިބަސްދަރިވަރުންގެއެހީތެރިޔާ Male’.

BELL, H. C. P.

Excerpta Máldiviana, Asian Educational Services, New Delhi, Madras 1998.

The Maldive Islands, Monograph on the History, A[r]chaeology and Epigraphy, Ceylon Government Press, Colombo 1940.

CHILDERS, R. C.

A Dictionary of the Pali Language, Asian Educational Services, New Delhi, Madras 1993.

CLOUGH, The Rev. B.

Sinhala English Dictionary, Asian Educational Services, New Delhi, Madras 1996.

COENDERS, H. (Managing Editor)

Kramers, Dictionary, Dutch-English, Thirty-eighth edition.

[page XVII]

COOPE, A. E.

Malay-English, English-Malay Dictionary, Student Edition, Macmillan Malasia [sic], Kua Lumpur & Penang.

DE SILVA, M. W. Sugathapala

The Phonological Efficiency of the Maldivian Writing System, In: Anthropological Linguistics , Vol. II, No. 7 (October 1969). Bombay 1967.

Some observations on the History of Maldivian, In: Transactions of the Philological Society of Great Britain, London/Oxford 1970.

Some Af[f]inities Between Sinhalese and Maldivian, In: Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, New Series, Vol. 14, Colombo 1970.

DHIVEHI THAAREEKHAH AU ALIKAMEH,

‘ ދިވެހިތާރީޚަށްއައުއަލިކަމެއް Ministry of Home Affairs, Male'.

DHIVEHI BAS FOIY,

‘ ދިވެހިބަސްފޮތް National Centre for Language and Historical Research, Male'.

DHIVEHI THAAREEKHAH,

‘ ދިވެހި ތާރީޚް National Council for Linguistic and Cultural Research, Office of the President, Male' 1981.

[page XVIII]

DISANAYAKA, J. B. & G. D. WIJAYAWARDHANA

Some Observations on the Maldivian Loamaafaanu Copper Plates of the Twelfth Century, In: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Sri Lanka Branch . New Series, Vol. 31 (1986/87). Colombo.

ELIAS A. ELIAS & ED. E. ELIAS,

The School Dictionary, English to Arabic, Arabic to English, Islamic Book Service, New Delhi.

GEIGER, Wilhelm

An Etymological Glossary of the Sinhalese Language, The Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch, Colombo 1941.

Maldivian Linguistic Studies, In: Journal of the Ceylon Branch of The Royal Asiatic Society, Vol: XXVII - Extra Number 1919, Colombo 1919. (Reprint Asian Educational Services 1996).

GUNAWARDENA, D. C.

Genera et Species Plantarum Zeylaniae, Flowering Plants of Ceylon, An etymological and historical study. Lake House Investments Ltd., Colombo.

A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, (Edited by J. Milton Cowan), Librairie du Liban, Beirut, Macdonald & Evans Ltd., London.

HARRISON, John

A Field Guide to The Birds of Sri Lanka, Oxford University Press 1999.

KEMP, Peter (Ed.)

The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea, Oxford University Press, 1988.

KING, Peter & Margaretha

Concise Dutch and English Dictionary, Dutch-English/English-Dutch, Teach Yourself Books.

LAMB, N. J.

Collins Gem Dictionary, English - Portuguese Portuguese - English, William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1984.

MALIM MOOSA MAAFAIY KALEYGEFAANU,

އަލްއީޤާޡް ފީތައްލީމުލްއަލްފާޡް Al Eagaaz' Fee Tha'uleemul Alfaaz', Male' 1937.

MONIER-WILLIAMS, Sir Monier

A Sanskrit-English Dictionary; Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1984.

NEW EDITION POPULAR OXFORD DICTIONARY,

Part 1 English to English & Urdu, Part 2 Urdu to Urdu & English, Oriental Book Society, Lahore.

OXFORD PAPERBACK PORTUGUESE DICTIONARY,

Portuguese-English, English-Portuguese, Oxford University Press, 1996.

RHYS DAVIDS, T. W. & WILLIAM STEDE,

Pali-English Dictionary, Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, New Delhi 1975.

STEINGASS, F.

Arabic-English Dictionary, Asian Educational Services, New Delhi, Madras 1993.

A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary, Sang-e-Meel Publications, Lahore 1977.

GUIDE TO TRANSLITERATION OF DHIVEHI

AKURU (Consonants):

Haa: ( ހ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " h " and is written with the letter h . It is pronounced as in h ear and h it. This is the ordinary aspirate.

Shaviyani: ( ށ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " sh " but it is closer to " r " and is written sh . Prof. Wilhelm Geiger in his Maldivian Linguistic Studies says: "expresses a sound peculiar to the Maldidvians, to which the (cerebral) t in Sinhalese is most closely allied. The sound is very difficult to describe and to imitate. It varies between R, H, and S; is rather soft; and is, so fa r as I could observe uttered by putting the tip of the tongue in the highest part of the palate, and letting the breath escape sideways between the teeth."

Noonu: ( ނ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " n " and is written with the letter n . It is pronounced as in n one and ow n , but with a lighter tone.

Raa: ( ރ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " r " and is written with the letter r . It is pronounced as in r ed and r ude.

Baa: ( ބ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " b " and is written with the letter b . It is pronounced as in b ear and ri b .

Lhaviyani: ( ޅ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " lh " and it is pronounced a deep l with the tongue reverting to the palate.

Kaafu: ( ކ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " k " and is written with the letter k . It is pronounced as in k ill and see k .

Alifu: ( އ ) Phonological value given to this letter are " a , e , i , o and u ". These values are taken by the letter in accordance with the fili and the position it occupy in the word and it is closely influenced by the vowel the consonant is given. It is pronounced as a , e , i , o or u .

Vaavu: ( ވ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " v " and it is pronounced as v and w . It is pronounced as in v i v id and gi v e.

Meemu: ( މ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " m " and it is pronounced as m . It is pronounced as in m ap and ja m .

[page XXII]

Faafu: ( ފ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " f " and it is pronounced as f . It is pronounced as in f i f ty and cu ff .

Dhaalu: ( ދ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " dh " and it is written as dh . It is pronounced as the sound in th is, th at and th en.

Thaa: ( ތ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " th " and it is written as th . It is pronounced as the sound in th ick, th in and e th er.

Laamu: ( ލ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " l " and it is written as l . It is pronounced as in l u ll and l ead.

Gaaf: ( ގ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " g " and it is written as g . It is pronounced as in g un and do g .

Gnaviyani: ( ޏ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " gn " and is written as gn . It is pronounced as mi n ion.

Seenu: ( ސ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " s " and is written as s . It is pronounced as in s aint and hi ss .

Daviyani: ( ޑ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " d " and is written as d . It is pronounced as in d ice and a d ult.

Zaviyani: ( ޒ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " z " and is written as z . It is pronounced as in z one and z odiac.

Taviyani: ( ޓ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " t " and is written as t . It is pronounced as in t ie and t ree.

Yaviyani: ( ޔ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " y " and is written as y . It is pronounced as in y et and lo y al.

Paviyani: ( ޕ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " p " and is written as p . It is pronounced as in p e pp er and si p .

Javiyani: ( ޖ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " j " and is written as j . It is pronounced as in j am and j ump.

Chaviyani: ( ޗ ) Phonological value given to this letter is " ch " and written as ch . It is [page XXIII] pronounced as in ch in and ch ange.

FILI (Vowels):

In Dhivehi writing the fili, which occupy the value of a vowel is written either at the top or beneath a consonant and the consonant letter cannot be pronounced unless it is given a vowel accompaniment. Without this diacri[ti]cal mark a letter is only a neutral sound. The diacritical marks used for fili and their values are:

Aba fili: ( ަ  ) Phonological value given to this is " a ", and it is pronounced as the sound in m u d, c u t and h u mdr u m. It is a short vowel. It is always written on top of a letter.

Aabaa fili: ( ާ  ) Phonological value given to this is " aa ". It is the sound of Aba fili lengthened, and is pronounced as the sound in f a ther and c a rter. It is a long vowel and is always written on top of a letter.

Ibi fili: ( ި  ) Phonological value given to this is " i ". It is pronounced as the sound in p i n, b i t, h i d and t i p. It is a short vowel and is always written beneath a letter.

Eebee fili: ( ީ  ) Phonological value given to this is " ee ". It is the sound of Ibi fili lengthened, and is pronounced as the sound in s ee n, h ee d, m ea t and bl ee d. It is a long vowel and is always written beneath a letter.

Ubu fili: ( ު  ) Phonological value given to this is " u ", and is pronounced as the sound in p u ll, p u t and b u ll. It is a short vowel and always written on top of a letter.

Ooboo fili: ( ޫ  ) Phonological value given to this is " oo ". It is Ubu fili lengthened, and is pronounced as the sound in r u le, sh oe s and l o se. It is a long vowel and is always written on top of a letter.

Ebe fili: ( ެ  ) Phonological value given to this is " e ", and is pronounced as the sound of b e d and b e t. In pronunciation of this vowel in Dhivehi the lips are more spread out than in English. It is a short vowel and is always written on top of a letter.

Eybey fili: ( ޭ  ) Phonological value given to this is " ey ". It is Ebe fili lengthened. There is no equivalent in English for this. The closest is the diphthong " ei ". It is pronounced somewhat as the sound in s a y and f a n. It is a long vowel and is always written on top of a letter.

[page XXIV]

Obo fili: ( ޮ  ) Phonological value given to this is " o ", and is pronounced as the sound-in s o ft, d o t and c o t. It is a short vowel and is always written on top of a letter.

Oaboa fili: ( ޯ  ) Phonological value given to this is " oa ". It is the Obo fili lengthened. There is no equivalent in English for this. The closest is to pronounce it as in c au ght, b ou ght, g oa t and a ll. It is a long vowel and is always written on top of a letter.

Sukun: ( ް  ) Phonological value of this varies according to the position in wh[i]ch it is used. When it comes at the final position of a word with either Alifu or Shaviyani the end is abrupt and the value used is " h ". In this case this value stands for a letter that has "disappeared" in that particular case, but comes back when the word is either joined with another word or used in full. When Sukun comes with the consonant Thaa it is pronounced almost same as "disappearing" sound. It is now standard to represent this phonological value with " iy ". Sukun when accompanied with other consonants are easy to read and there is no confusion. It is always written on top of the consonant, the phonological expression which it has to convey.

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Dhivehi Sitee

Maldives: ecocide as achievement.

Humay Abdulghafoor

On 15 March 2023,  fireworks and led lights  lit up a site of state sponsored ecocide in the southernmost tip of Gaaf Dhaal atoll in the Maldives, as President Solih celebrated another destructive airport project.

Holding pole position on the victim-list of global climate change, Maldives pleads shamelessly for global climate funds.  It also expects to blamelessly destroy finite natural ecosystems and climate change defences for short-term political expediency, and claim from the international taxpayer to ‘mitigate’ willful ecocide. The government of Maldives is well aware of the imminent and unknowable impacts of global climate heating to its natural foundations, which constitute  the seventh largest coral system  in the world. The country’s finite ecosystems including coral reefs, seagrass beds, mangroves, wetlands and the rich and yet to be studied biodiversity within, sustains the nation’s economic lifelines – its tourism and fishing industries. The Maldives State of the Environment Report 2016 says that 98% of the country’s exports and 71% of its employment are directly linked to its biodiversity sector. This is unsurprising in a nation constituting 99% ocean and 1% land. This land which lies mostly below the one meter mark above mean sea level, is entirely dependent on the stability of its surrounding marine environment.

However, the government of Maldives’ development approach undermines the stability of the balance of nature in the country. It entertains a policy of domestic aviation and airport infrastructure that is grossly and disproportionately overblown in the context, capacity and need, at the expense of multiple ecosystems. The policy to have a domestic airport at every 20-30 minute travel distance attempts to justify expansion that is financially and environmentally debilitating to the country.

The multitude of questionable and destructive ecocide projects like Faresmaathodaa Airport are not environmentally accounted. The extreme loss and damage inflicted on ecosystems, the loss of services they provide to communities and existing businesses dependent on them are not valued, as a matter of practice. These projects are conducted as if these natural systems have no inherent value as the natural defences of the country. It is a well established fact that the country’s reef ecosystem foundations were instrumental in defending these small, low-lying islands in the middle of the Indian ocean. The 2004 Asian Tsunami travelling at a speed of 500 mph was slowed down by these reef defences that took the brunt of the hit. To destroy and bury these defences willfully during a self-proclaimed  ‘climate emergency’  is akin to digging its own grave. The government of Maldives is invested in free riding on the narrative that it faces an existential crisis due to global climate heating, and take no responsibility to cease widespread and irresponsible ecocide nationally.

Faresmaathodaa Airport Ecocide

The political fanfare and fireworks surrounding the Faresmaathodaa ecocide is a superficial show covering up extreme environmental loss and damage, the value of which is entirely dismissed and ignored. The airport was built by destroying 5 uninhabited islets south of the inhabited island of Faresmaathodaa. The  reclamation component  of the project is nearly MVR 80 million (~USD 5.3 million). According to the State broadcaster PSM, the  airport project cost  an estimated USD 10 million.

The environmental damage and destruction the project will cause is outlined in the project environmental assessment (EIA) of July 2018. The project was estimated to remove 14,000 to 16,000 trees from the impact area, although the environmental or social cost was not accounted. The EIA further said that

“ coastal construction activities will involve significant adverse impacts on the marine water quality and marine life. The most significant will be the turbidity impacts from the dredging, reclamation and shore protection activities. Biota associated with the seabed within these footprints will be lost, either due to physical removal during dredging or burial during reclamation works. ” (project EIA, pg.xvii – italics added).

The report further described the project’s proposed and anticipated future impacts, saying that,

“There are potentially severe impacts predicted due to hydrodynamic changes. The reclamation across five islands and funneling effect created between Faresmaathodaa and the airport may cause severe erosion on the eastern shoreline of Fares and western shoreline of Kan’dehdhudhuvaa.   There is also strong likelihood of flooding on the airport due to the elevation and shore protection designs proposed, and given the fact that Faremaathodaa [sic] has a known history of coastal flooding.”  (project EIA, pg.xvii – italics added).

The decision to ignore the environmental and ecological consequences of ecocide to build short-term, ecologically high-impact and loss-making infrastructure for political gain undermines every legal and governance requirement to develop Maldives sustainably. This approach to infrastructure development imposes a crippling environmental and financial burden on the country, incurring loss upon loss.

Kulhudhuffushi Airport Ecocide

Politically driven ecocide projects continue to plague the Maldivian people and their aspirations for meaningful change to improve their lives through sustainable development activities. Sustainability, viability, economic and financial feasibility are of little to no concern for politician-driven ecocide projects. In October 2017, the government of Maldives went ahead with the destruction of  Kulhudhuffushi mangroves and wetland  to build an airport in the middle of one of the largest wetland ecosystems in the country,  amid public protests . State owned company MTCC Plc with no experience in airport development was assigned the project, using its first ever dredging vessel built by Netherlands company  ICH Holland in China . In a press statement, the  President’s Office said  that the vessel, named “ Mahaa Jarraafu is capable of conducting land reclamation activities without causing damage to the environment. ” (italics added)

The project’s immediate negative  consequences were widespread , including the displacement and dispossession of local livelihood resources and economies affecting over 400 families. Other impacts to the community showed when Kulhudhuffushi began to experience  increased flooding  which had significant direct impacts on people’s homes and property. Efforts by the #SaveMaldives Campaign and concerned stakeholders to protect the  remaining part of the wetlands  have been ignored by the current government.

In 2023, Kulhudhuffushi airport requires extensive shore-protection works as erosion threatens it. The  national budget  has thus far allocated over MVR 20 million (~USD 1.4 million) to address the continuing impacts of the destruction caused by the airport project. Today, nearly 6 years after the project began, Kulhudhuffushi Airport is still not fully operational. Notably, President Yameen Abdul Gayoom was  impatient to inaugurate  the airport project, and did so before the airport terminal could be completed, as part of his failed re-election campaign in 2018. The airport continues to suffer from significant critical infrastructure deficits which limit flight movements.  Its operational functions were initially hindered by the absence of key operational components such as fire and rescue and ground handling services. To date, the airport has yet to install runway lights.

Hoarafushi Airport Ecocide

The ecocide case of Haa Alif Atoll Hoarafushi Airport which was a political project initiated in 2019 showed yet again the catastrophic consequences of willful ecosystem destruction by the government of Maldives and its political decision-makers. The airport was constructed in record time by the Maldives State owned company MTCC Plc (once again), and opened with the usual fanfare by  President Solih in November 2019 . Initial reports suggested the airport construction  cost MVR 198 million  (~USD 13.2 million) while another said it cost  MVR 211 million  (~USD 14 million).  The government project portal shows that between 2019 and 2021, over  MVR 233 million  (~USD 15.5 million) had been spent on this project.

The project EIA’s First Addendum of March 2019, on the strength of which the project was approved, reached the following conclusion :

“The study found that through the implementation of the proposed practical and cost effective mitigation measures in this addendum report in conjunction with the EIA all significant impacts can be brought to an acceptable level.” (pg. 158) 

This pivotal project EIA document provides  no valuation or accounting  for environmental or ecological loss and damage the project would cause. At this point, it might interest the reader to know that the producer of the Hoarafushi Airport EIA is the incumbent People’s Majlis (Maldives parliament) MP for Hoarafushi, Ahmed Saleem who ran for his parliamentary seat for this constituency in April 2019, with a pledge to develop this airport. MP Saleem is also the Chairperson of the permanent parliamentary committee known as the  Environment and Climate Change Committee . In this capacity, he is also known for having  submitted an application  in December 2019 to the International Criminal Court on behalf of the Maldives, to make ecocide an international crime. The situation could hardly be more ironic, duplicitous or dishonorable.

Just five months after its November 2019 inauguration, Hoarafushi Airport  was inundated  due to high winds and tidal surges during the monsoon in May 2020, causing  significant losses  raising key questions about the project’s  planning, construction and management . In April 2021, reports emerged that the causeway linking Hoarafushi island to the airport  would be removed , confirming the serious gaps in the project’s planning, approval and implementation.  A  scientific study on coastal flooding  in the Maldives published in 2021 observed that Hoarafushi island experiences the “highest incoming waves in the archipelago”. The fact that the Hoarafushi Airport EIA addendum was produced by a technical practitioner who either missed or deliberately ignored this basic scientific fact is astounding. This leaves room to suggest that the evident personal conflict of interest in this case trumped the public interest. The fact that the Maldives Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also failed to act on this fundamental fact by approving the airport EIA is indicative of monumental regulatory failures. These failures highlight the political realities that make unchecked ecocide actively endorsed and normative in the Maldives. The complete absence of accountability and professional due diligence undermines the ecological and human security, and therefore, the present and future stability of the country.

Ecocide as Achievement for Political Expedience

This brings me back to the case of Faresmaathodaa Airport. It is not lost to the Maldivian people that Faresmaathodaa is the home island of the incumbent Minister for National Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, Mohamed Aslam. Similar to Mr Saleem MP for Hoarafushi, he also has a professional history of producing EIAs. Prior to his current cabinet post, Mr Aslam, who holds a BSc in Geological Oceanography, held the position of director at the EIA consultancy company La Mer. There, he was personally involved in the production of the EIA to construct a causeway between the islands of Madaveli and Hoadedhdhoo in Gaaf Dhaal atoll, in 2016. This project was also commissioned to MTCC Plc, and have proved to be an ongoing, financially wasteful and  catastrophic ecocide project since 2012. This history has relevance to the kind of decision-making we see by these politicians.

The Faresmaathodaa Airport project plans pre-date the current administration. The opportunity to prevent the loss of environmental stability of 6 islands and their surrounding natural defences and assets was available to this government. President Solih’s government and his cabinet in which Mr Aslam sits, chose not to do that. They chose to commit willful ecocide in this case, as in several others, continuing to gaslight the public and attempt to package these acts of destruction and irreversible losses as achievements.

As long as political decision-makers in influential positions are allowed to exploit public finances and environmental assets for personal political expedience, the Maldives vulnerability to climate disasters will continue to spiral. High level officials including the President, members of his Cabinet and their partners in the Peoples’ Majlis continue to celebrate ecocide as achievement in the Maldives. This stands in absolute and stark contrast to the narrative of vulnerability to climate change these same public officials attempt to sell, especially internationally. Their gross professional misconduct and failure to uphold legal and public duty should be understood as that.

This article, with its accompanying images, was first published on 19 March 2023 on SaveMaldives.net Click here to visit the original article and sign the petition #SaveAddu Biosphere Reserve. Re-posted here with author’s permission.

Image 1: Kulhudhuffushi before the Airport Ecocide  📷 Save Maldives campaign , Image 2: Faresmaathodaa (2011 – 2022)  📷 Google Earth , Image 3: Kulhudhuffushi (2006 – 2022)  📷 Google Earth , Image 4: Hoarafushi (2016 – 2022)  📷 Google Earth

Open letter to the people of The Netherlands, from the environmentally endangered Maldives

January, 2023 

Dear Netherlands,

New Year’s greetings from the Maldives. You may have heard about our country: an earthly “paradise” that is home to luxury tourism. That’s the marketed image, representing a “sunny side of life”. We also have several, less sunny stories. This particular one is about the endangered and finite ecosystems of the Maldives that have an unhappy connection to your country, the Netherlands.

You and us – we are all in the same predicament, even if we are not in the same hemisphere. We are all experiencing a great earth-heating climate crisis that is breaking down global climate systems. Scientists tell us that we humans are causing this Earth crisis. The United Nations tells us the situation is “code red for humanity.” Our actions and inaction have been creating an existential and extinction crisis.

Of course, the Dutch people would be very familiar with what this means.

You will no doubt remember the landmark decision of the Dutch Supreme Court on 20 December 2019, the  Urgenda Climate Case , which decided that the Dutch government had obligations to “urgently and significantly reduce emissions in line with its human rights obligations”.  All governments have these obligations, although most choose to do little or nothing. The Netherlands is very lucky to have a judicial system where redress is available in court for serious grievances raised by concerned people, against unlawful and irresponsible decisions of the government, in our time of catastrophic climate crisis.

The Urgenda decision seeks to protect not just yourselves, but all of us inhabiting the Earth.

While we in the Maldives may be thousands of miles away, this decision in the Dutch courts is a big deal.

The whole world knows today that politicians around the world have consistently failed to address the climate crisis with decades of failed and farcical international conferences. This is why the Dutch Supreme Court’s decision in Urgenda stands out.

As you know, global climate breakdown is an existential crisis for many of us living in coastal nations, especially low lying small islands like the Maldives. Most of our 1,200 or so islands are less than one metre above sea-level. Our islands are made of coral and sand. Every island is an organic, living entity, protected by a living reef-defence-system, sometimes with the additional security of seagrass meadows and mangrove ecosystems which, when healthy, are teeming with marine life and biodiversity. We are just beginning to understand the richness of this biodiversity, which remains poorly studied.

Less than a year ago, a species of fish  new to science  was discovered in the Maldives. Who knows how many more are waiting to be discovered?

But our life-giving ocean, marine life, and biodiversity which collectively make up our critical natural reef defence systems have been under increasing threats due to many factors involving destructive and unsustainable development practices.  Many of our reefs and lagoons have been completely and irreversibly destroyed . You may wonder who or what is destroying the reefs of the Maldives? The simple answer is that, primarily, it is the government and political decision-makers of the Maldives. But  the government has been able to do this with the help of global dredging corporations  and banks, although today, Maldives also has its own state-owned company, MTCC Plc also doing enormous damage.

The leading giants of the trade are two notable companies, Royal Boskalis and Van Oord, from the Netherlands. They are the expensive and profitable tools deployed to destroy our living environment, irreversibly and permanently. This story is mainly about the activities of Boskalis.

Royal Boskalis has over a decade-long history of reclamation that has destroyed community reefs and livelihood assets in several islands of the Maldives .  Some of these activities are labeled as ‘climate adaptation projects’. The cost of that destruction is enormous, running into millions of US dollars of public debt, often loaned from the ING Bank of Netherlands. In 2010,  Royal Boskalis  and MT- Hojgaard of Netherlands engaged in reclaiming five islands in the Maldives at an estimated US$43 million, borrowed from the ING Bank of Netherlands. These are the kinds of funds that are not available locally to develop community-based initiatives that improve people’s lives. You may be surprised to learn that this reclaimed land from over a decade ago remains unused and unavailable to local people.

This is, of course, a problem of the Maldives government. The point is that the  big reclamation contracts to big companies, paid with large amounts of public debt , continue with relative ease, while no funds are available to do anything with the reclaimed land. Reclamation destroys sustainable livelihood resources and undermines the basic security functions of the living island reef systems irreversibly. Once an ancient reef is lost, it cannot be brought back. The partial or complete destruction of the natural reef defenses exposes islands to erosion and climate change disasters.

More recently in 2019,  Royal Boskalis was contracted  to undertake the largest and deepest reclamation project thus far in the Maldives: the Gulhifalhu Port Development project , which is estimated to cost Maldivian taxpayers US$120 million  just for the reclamation .  Notably, the project was contracted to Boskalis  before  an environmental impact assessment (EIA) was produced to understand its impacts. It was also  contracted without a bid , which media reported was being probed by the Maldives Anti-Corruption Commission. Whether anyone has been held to account about such irregularities is not known in the murky governance environment of the Maldives.

The Gulhifalhu project will dredge an area of 13.75 sq/km in northern Malé Atoll, extracting 24.5 million cubic metres of naturally formed biogenic sand from the ocean to reclaim the Gulhifalhu lagoon.   The environmental and eco-systemic loss and damage of this project was poorly evaluated, and the loss and damage have not been properly costed environmentally or financially . This may be because the project’s initial EIA noted that the project was a foregone conclusion even before the EIA was commissioned. It is also a sad fact that the EIA processes in the Maldives are deeply flawed and do not serve the public interest.

What is also a foregone conclusion is that the project will destroy a marine protected area (MPA) in Gulhifalhu lagoon, called the Hans Haas Place and designated in 1995. It is also accepted that the project will negatively impact approximately 30 dive sites in the area, having significantly damaging impacts on reef ecosystems, including the reefs of several resorts in the area. The project is expected to destroy the last remaining natural reef freely accessible to local people in the area, located in Villimale island a few hundred metres from the Gulhifalhu lagoon. It will also  negatively impact small businesses and fisherfolk.

In June 2020, when Boskalis first began dredging the lagoon, a significant sediment plume  damaged the Villimale reef . However, concerns expressed by local people and  civil society stakeholders  about the project, which was submitted for parliamentary scrutiny, was largely ignored by the Maldives government and the parliament. Instead of protecting Gulhifalhu and its threatened surrounding marine ecosystems, the parliament’s Environment and Climate Change Committee instead chose to justify the project.

This is a satellite image of the #Gulhifalhu sediment plume in July 2020 when Boskalis began dredging to reclaim the lagoon. This is documented in the #AdduAtoll reclamation EIA, Additional Information, September 2022. Sedimentation KILLS marine ecosystems. #SaveMaldives 🪸🐠🌊 pic.twitter.com/h8JO7sPw6u — #SaveMaldives Campaign (@SaveMaldivesMV) January 18, 2023

A few months prior to this, the Maldives parliament had passed a motion to declare a  Climate Emergency  in the Maldives. At the same time, the Maldives suffers deeply from political instability, poor governance, policy poverty, endemic  corruption  and even poorer environmental protections of its own finite natural resources and assets. This may be a surprise to anyone reading about the Maldives’ leading role at climate conferences and global victim-status from impending climate catastrophe. The  story on the ground  is far removed from that politically manufactured image of the ‘sinking Maldives’ with ‘no higher ground’ to climb. That political rhetoric is disseminated around the world by the international media, on behalf of well-connected politicians who receive copious amounts of column inches and broadcast coverage.

In June 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic while the country was in lockdown, Boskalis arrived on site and engaged in a  greenwash initiative  to “relocate corals” from the Gulhifalhu reef. The company said this was conducted as a CSR (corporate social responsibility) activity!

Is it really so noble of a global corporation taking on a multi-million dollar project financed with foreign loans that must be covered by public debt to offer CSR to that same foreign state? It is evident that this is part of the company’s marketing strategy of presenting an image of ‘eco-friendly’ credentials.

The notion suggesting that a reef can be ‘relocated’ is unintelligible, with no scientific credibility as any Maldivian or visitor to the Maldives who has seen our natural reefs would know. This idea is absolutely untenable, has no substance and is nothing but a corporate smokescreen. Coral gardening, involving the removal of coral fragments to grow elsewhere, is an experimental tourist attraction in some resorts in the Maldives, which is also a type of corporate greenwashing.  However, the project’s official website considers “coral relocation”  a triumph  of the project!

Due to the enormity of the destruction planned by the Gulhifalhu reclamation project,  civil litigation action  to stop it was lodged at the Civil Court of Maldives in September 2021, which remains pending to date. Sadly, the Maldives courts do not have a good history of protecting the country’s fragile environment or holding the government accountable for environmental crimes. This is so even if some of our laws on environmental protection are reasonably progressive. Unlike the Netherlands, the courts in the Maldives are yet to be tested to address environmental destruction and our common climate crisis. This is the case despite the country’s extreme vulnerability and position at the forefront of global climate breakdown. This is in spite of the Maldives’ political pleas to the world at international fora to act on the climate, through its projected image internationally as a ‘climate champion’.

A significant amount of inconsistent, opposing and opportunistic narratives are created by Maldivian politicians with short-term goals who willfully risk the health and life of entire ecosystems, people’s lives and sources of livelihood. But they cannot do this without the active support of global corporations like Boskalis and the ING Bank of Netherlands. As the European Union strengthens its laws and law enforcement to do due diligence on climate change related matters, European corporations are finding poorly governed nations like the Maldives to exploit.

In June 2022, undeterred by its  people’s concerns, the government of Maldives took out a loan of €101 million from  three European banks , including the ING Bank of Netherlands, to continue with the second phase of the Gulhifalhu reclamation project. Boskalis is expected to be back in the Maldives in 2023 to inflict extreme damage to the north Malé region with the next and most destructive phase of the reclamation project. Since its initial estimate of 20 million cubic metres of sand use, the project has increased this to 24.5 million cubic metres using an addendum to the EIA in November 2021. What the project will eventually extract is anyone’s guess.

This is a situation where information is withheld from the public and Boskalis’ sand-search survey for the Gulhifalhu project is considered a ‘trade secret’, even from the Maldives parliament!  We do not know the scope of damage this project will cause to the region when a massive dredging vessel deploys its destructive forces into a marine environment rich with life from the seabed to the surface. The after-effects of a string of expensive, historical reclamation projects under Royal Boskalis’ belt in the Maldives have never been studied. There are no funds to study the loss and damage. There is never enough funds to obtain accurate baseline data for these projects either. The funds are instead available from corporate banks for corporations like Boskalis to inflict permanent irreversible and unstudied damage at great financial and debt costs to the people of Maldives.

These are highly lucrative multi-million dollar projects, taking just a few short months for the contractor to impose untold ecological harm. The direct and collateral damage inflicted by Boskalis will be suffered by present and future generations of Maldivians. This will happen after the vessel has made its money and safely left our shores, leaving us to deal with the debt, destruction and damage as the climate crisis unfolds before us.

As the new year breaks in 2023, the news breaking in the Maldives is that two of the most damaging marine contractors from the Netherlands will be actively destroying critical marine ecosystems with unknown losses and damage to communities and people in the Maldives. Van Oord is planning to dredge Addu Atoll Biosphere Reserve, endangering multiple MPAs, marine habitats of mega-fauna such as manta rays and undermining the climate resilience of the entire atoll. Royal Boskalis will be preparing to destroy Gulhifalhu reef and lagoon.

These are the untold stories of Maldives on the frontline of the global climate crisis. As we become increasingly conscious of our interconnectedness on earth, it is necessary to tell the story of how one nation’s business enterprise has become another’s destruction and demise.

If you have come this far, thank you for reading. And thank you for Urgenda.

That decision carries with it a spark of hope for many.

The Maldives, Indian Ocean

#savemaldives  is a citizen-led environmental campaign by concerned individuals from diverse backgrounds who are extremely worried about irreversible environmental destruction in the Maldives .

This open letter was first published on Contested Ports . Re-posted here with author’s permission.

Modern Maldives and the necessary virtue of homophobia

Azra Naseem

Homosexuality is spreading across the Maldives like a plague. This lewd, dirty and haram behaviour, which defies belief and defiles humanity, is being promoted to young Maldivian minds, especially children and adolescents through the online platforms which the young use with such enthusiasm today. It is part of a deep dark propaganda, pre-planned long-term, disseminated under the labels of ‘human rights’ and ‘civil rights’ that seeks to spread this filthy ideology across the entire world. It is a way of thinking that accepts abnormal ideas, such as same sex relations and gender transition, as normal and reasonable. 

The threat from messages shared across the Internet with young Maldivians are making them homosexual. A nationwide battle—with parents, teachers, schools, government and of course religious clerics and law enforcement, on the frontlines—is required to police the awakening of sexual feelings for people of the same sex among the young people. Everybody must be vigilant for homosexual tendencies within their communities, and every citizen must take on the role of being the guardian of the other’s sexual orientation and experiences. 

I didn’t make that stuff up. The Religious Council of the Adhaalath Party did . The Home Minister, Imran Abdulla, is the  leader of Adhaalath. This is a party which has no electoral representation but has won political power through top jobs in the coalition government awarded to them for entirely political reasons. 

Adhaalath views are, of course, Imran’s views. It was always on the cards that as Home Minister in the coalition government, he would push the Adhaalath agenda. Imran came under criticism from his clerical tribe for not taking tougher action against gays, so he confirmed his commitment to the homophobic cause by issuing a statement that promised to crackdown on any lurid behaviour. 

To prevent the wrath of Allah, and for the general well-being and security of the community, such acts must be absolutely forbidden, so the clerics keep shouting from every available platform.

Thing is, homosexuality is already very much forbidden in the Maldives. The penal code prohibits sexual intercourse between same sex couples and prohibits same sex marriage. The Qur’an itself does not specify a punishment for homosexuality but The Maldives Penal Code does: up to eight years in prison, lashings and/or fines. According to the Penal Code, whenever the Quran is silent on a specific punishment, what the Penal Code says will apply. 

As the country’s laws show, tolerance of homosexuality is nowhere on the agenda. The Maldives is already one of the worst places in the world to be gay in this century, but the punishment is insufficiently spectacular or brutal to satisfy the homophobia of Maldivian clerics and religious leaders.

So this is what they say should happen:

Under the circumstances, we call upon relevant authorities to identify those who commit such filthy acts, those who are involved in the commission of such acts, those who spread such acts amongst the people, and to judge them under Islamic Sharia and to punish the guilty according to Sharia. Additionally, we call upon the relevant authorities to identify those who engage in human trafficking and to also punish them according to the just punishments specified in Islam. We also advice all citizens to fear Allah and to distance themselves from such filthy and lurid acts.

Homophobia as a campaign platform

Maldivian Islamists really fancy a spot in the upcoming Presidential election of 2023. Homophobia has presented them with the perfect platform. 

The Maldivian population, of course, has its share of same sex couples and other sexual minorties. Unlike countries where ‘western notions’ of civil and human rights have taken hold and States are finally opting to stay out of people’s sex lives, Maldivian political and religious leaders are very firmly ensconced in Dhivehi bedrooms, strictly regulating whom consenting adults can have sex with. 

The clerics have carved themselves an especially comfortable space among bedroom furniture in the last decade. Dressed to perform with swishing robes and long beards and prayer-scarred foreheads, they have been relentlessly dispensing marriage and sex advice to the Maldivian public—how many of his four wives must a man pleasure in one night, and how often; how should a girl’s clitoris be trimmed for optimal male sexual pleasure; how many times a man can be reasonably expected to tolerate a wife’s No to his sexual needs before he can justifiably hit her; what sexual position does the Sunnah say best satisfies the husband, etc etc—through every Internet platform available to them. And their followers have lapped it all up, every Like, every Thumbs Up, every Fist Bump validating clerical power over Maldivian sex lives and the power of Islamist patriarchy. 

Given the position which the coalition government, and the public, have willingly handed over to the clerics in deciding what Maldivians do in private, it is not surprising that Islamists are almost fighting each other over who can be more homophobic. 

The Islamists probably did not have a hand in setting up the ‘honey trap’ for several politically prominent gays in which they have been secretly recorded having sexual relations with a foreign male sex worker. But, the footage, which was leaked on social media over the past few weeks, has given Maldivian clerics the airtime and the column inches they so desperately needed to become an indispensable player in the coming elections. 

Vote for me, I hate Gays

Ali Rameez, a SILF for many, has already tested the presidential waters. The Sheikh on a Bike has always been quite the narcissist (the last time I criticised him, he and his tribe accused me of mocking Prophet Muhammad). 

“So many people want me to become president”, he gushed to a reporter recently. Nobody has publicly admitted to asking any such thing of him; but, they would be sorry to know, Rameez presumptuously continued, he has not yet decided to run. 

He was simply doing his duty as a good Muslim touring the islands during Eid to rain some homophobia on everyone’s parade. 

Gays, he said, cannot be allowed to set foot on a Maldivian island. They must be turned away, shamed, hated, ostracised and punished. Welcoming them to your islands, he said to his followers, is welcoming sin itself. His holiness could not contain his disappointment with people of an island who had welcomed an alleged lesbian on their shores.

Should they have thrown the harlot to sea? He left that part for between the lines.

Wish as you may, Ali Rameez is not an aberration, he is the norm. He has been the most successful catch of the early Salafi recruitment drive in the Maldives. He dropped his love-mic, rocked the Da’wah, and has ever since dedicated his entire post-popstar life to spreading the Salafi word. 

Ali Rameez no longer sings to please the female heart and no longer earns his money serenading the female body. He now only sings to praise God and if he speaks of the female body today it is as its male owner. He speaks as a man who considers a girl to be a woman once she reaches puberty, as one who can rightly marry four of them, as a man who can have sex with them as their husband even if they don’t want it. He now only speaks of woman as someone with whom he can do as he pleases because he is male, and therefore, superior. 

Ali Rameez will not allow a society in which two consenting adults have sex outside of marriage but wholeheartedly supports one in which sex with a girl child is fine as long as the man marries the child first. 

If anyone is putting filth into the minds of young Maldivian children it is not the deeply closeted Maldivian sexual minorities but the so-called ‘scholars’ who want Maldivians to embrace an intolerant, aggressive and punitive Islam in which society is not only forbidden from any acts not allowed in the first three centuries of Islam, it must also embrace the barbaric punishments of those ancient times.

Watch as the network that Salaf and Adhaalath actors have in mind kick into action and they declare a Gay Hunt across society, spreading fear, inciting hatred, and imposing brutal punishments on Maldivian minorities that all citizens must enjoy and applaud to prove their own virtue and Muslimness.

Don’t be surprised if society goes along with it. Ali Rameez is probably right. Most Maldivians today would love him to be president.

The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism

The rise of an academic theory and its obsession with Israel

O n October 7 , Hamas killed four times as many Israelis in a single day as had been killed in the previous 15 years of conflict. In the months since, protesters have rallied against Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. But a new tone of excitement and enthusiasm could be heard among pro-Palestinian activists from the moment that news of the attacks arrived, well before the Israeli response began. Celebrations of Hamas’s exploits are familiar sights in Gaza and the West Bank, Cairo and Damascus; this time, they spread to elite college campuses, where Gaza-solidarity encampments became ubiquitous this past spring. Why?

The answer is that, long before October 7, the Palestinian struggle against Israel had become widely understood by academic and progressive activists as the vanguard of a global battle against settler colonialism, a struggle also waged in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other countries created by European settlement. In these circles, Palestine was transformed into a standard reference point for every kind of social wrong, even those that seem to have no connection to the Middle East.

One of the most striking things about the ideology of settler colonialism is the central role played by Israel, which is often paired with the U.S. as the most important example of settler colonialism’s evils. Many Palestinian writers and activists have adopted this terminology. In his 2020 book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine , the historian Rashid Khalidi writes that the goal of Zionism was to create a “white European settler colony.” For the Palestinian intellectual Joseph Massad, Israel is a product of “European Jewish Settler-Colonialism,” and the “liberation” referred to in the name of the Palestine Liberation Organization is “liberation from Settler-Colonialism.”

Western activists and academics have leaned heavily on the idea. Opposition to building an oil pipeline under a Sioux reservation was like the Palestinian cause in that it “makes visible the continuum of systems of subjugation and expropriation across liberal democracies and settler-­colonial regimes.” When the city of Toronto evicted a homeless encampment from a park, it was like Palestine because both are examples of “ethnic cleansing” and “colonial ‘domicide,’ making Indigenous people homeless on their homelands.” Health problems among Native Americans can be understood in terms of Palestine, because the “hyper-­visible Palestine case …  provides a unique temporal lens for understanding settler colonial health determinants more broadly.” Pollution, too, can be understood through a Palestinian lens, according to the British organization Friends of the Earth, because Palestine demonstrates that “the world is an unequal place” where “marginalised and vulnerable people bear the brunt of injustice.”

Although Israel fails in obvious ways to fit the model of settler colonialism, it has become the standard reference point because it offers theorists and activists something that the United States does not: a plausible target. It is hard to imagine America or Canada being truly decolonized, with the descendants of the original settlers returning to the countries from which they came and Native peoples reclaiming the land. But armed struggle against Israel has been ongoing since it was founded, and Hamas and its allies still hope to abolish the Jewish state “between the river and the sea.” In the contemporary world, only in Israel can the fight against settler colonialism move from theory to practice.

T he concept of settler colonialism was developed in the 1990s by theorists in Australia, Canada, and the U.S., as a way of linking social evils in these countries today—such as climate change, patriarchy, and economic inequality—to their origin in colonial settlement. In the past decade, settler colonialism has become one of the most important concepts in the academic humanities, the subject of hundreds of books and thousands of papers, as well as college courses on topics such as U.S. history, public health, and gender studies.

Read: The curious rise of settler colonialism and Turtle Island

For the academic field of settler-colonial studies, the settlement process is characterized by European settlers discovering a land that they consider “terra nullius,” the legal property of no one; their insatiable hunger for expansion that fills an entire continent; and the destruction of Indigenous peoples and cultures. This model, drawn from the history of Anglophone colonies such as the U.S. and Australia, is regularly applied to the history of Israel even though it does not include any of these hallmarks.

When modern Zionist settlement in what is now Israel began in the 1880s, Palestine was a province of the Ottoman empire, and after World War I, it was ruled by the British under a mandate from the League of Nations. Far from being “no one’s land,” Jews could settle there only with the permission of an imperial government, and when that permission was withdrawn—­as it fatefully was in 1939, when the British sharply limited Jewish immigration on the eve of the Holocaust—they had no recourse. Far from expanding to fill a continent, as in North America and Australia, the state of Israel today is about the size of New Jersey. The language, culture, and religion of the Arab peoples remain overwhelmingly dominant: 76 years after Israel was founded, it is still the only Jewish country in the region, among 22 Arab countries, from Morocco to Iraq.

Most important, the Jewish state did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine, though it did displace many of them. Here the comparison between European settlement in North America and Jewish settlement in Israel is especially inapt. In the decades after Europeans arrived in Massachusetts, the Native American population of New England declined from about 140,000 to 10,000, by one estimate . In the decades after 1948, the Arab population of historic Palestine more than quintupled, from about 1.4 million to about 7.4 million. The persistence of the conflict in Israel-Palestine is due precisely to the coexistence of two peoples in the same land—­as opposed to the classic sites of settler colonialism, where European settlers decimated Native peoples.

In the 21st century, the clearest examples of ongoing settler colonialism can probably be found in China. In 2023, the United Nations Human Rights office reported that the Chinese government had compelled nearly 1 million Tibetan children to attend residential schools “aimed at assimilating Tibetan people culturally, religiously and linguistically.” Forcing the next generation of Tibetans to speak Mandarin is part of a long-­term effort to Sinicize the region, which also includes encouraging Han Chinese to settle there and prohibiting public displays of traditional Buddhist faith.

China has mounted a similar campaign against the Uyghur people in the northwestern province of Xinjiang. Since 2017, more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims have been detained in what the Chinese government calls vocational training centers, which other countries describe as detention or reeducation camps. The government is also seeking to bring down Uyghur birth rates through mass sterilization and involuntary birth control.

These campaigns include every element of settler colonialism as defined by academic theorists. They aim to replace an existing people and culture with a new one imported from the imperial metropole, using techniques frequently described as genocidal in the context of North American history. Tibet’s residential schools are a tool of forced assimilation, like the ones established for Native American children in Canada and the United States in the 19th century. And some scholars of settler colonialism have drawn these parallels, acknowledging, in the words of the anthropologist Carole McGranahan, “that an imperial formation is as likely to be Chinese, communist, and of the twentieth or twenty-­first centuries as it is to be English, capitalist, and of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.”

Yet Tibet and Xinjiang—­like India’s rule in Kashmir, and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999—­occupy a tiny fraction of the space devoted to Israel-­Palestine on the mental map of settler-colonial studies. Some of the reasons for this are practical. The academic discipline mainly flourishes in English-­speaking countries, and its practitioners usually seem to be monolingual, making it necessary to focus on countries where sources are either written in English or easily available in translation. This rules out any place where a language barrier is heightened by strict government censorship, like China. Just as important, settler-colonial theorists tend to come from the fields of anthropology and sociology rather than history, area studies, and international relations, where they would be exposed to a wider range of examples of past and present conflict.

But the focus on Israel-­Palestine isn’t only a product of the discipline’s limitations. It is doctrinal. Academics and activists find adding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to other causes powerfully energizing, a way to give a local address to a struggle that can otherwise feel all too abstract. The price of collapsing together such different causes, however, is that it inhibits understanding of each individual cause. Any conflict that fails to fit the settler-colonial model must be made to fit.

I srael also fails to fit the model of settler colonialism in another key way: It defies the usual division between foreign colonizers and Indigenous people. In the discourse of settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples aren’t simply those who happen to occupy a territory before Europeans discovered it. Rather, indigeneity is a moral and spiritual status, associated with qualities such as authenticity, selflessness, and wisdom. These values stand as a reproof to settler ways of being, which are insatiably destructive. And the moral contrast between settler and indigene comes to overlap with other binaries—­white and nonwhite, exploiter and exploited, victor and victim.

Until recently, Palestinian leaders preferred to avoid the language of indigeneity, seeing the implicit comparison between themselves and Native Americans as defeatist. In an interview near the end of his life, in 2004, PLO Chair Yasser Arafat declared, “We are not Red Indians.” But today’s activists are more eager to embrace the Indigenous label and the moral valences that go with it, and some theorists have begun to recast Palestinian identity in ecological, spiritual, and aesthetic terms long associated with Native American identity. The American academic Steven Salaita has written that “Palestinian claims to life” are based in having “a culture indivisible from their surroundings, a language of freedom concordant to the beauty of the land.” Jamal Nabulsi of the University of Queensland writes that “Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is in and of the land. It is grounded in an embodied connection to Palestine and articulated in Palestinian ways of being, knowing, and resisting on and for this land.”

This kind of language points to an aspect of the concept of indigeneity that is often tacitly overlooked in the Native American context: its irrationalism. The idea that different peoples have incommensurable ways of being and knowing, rooted in their relationship to a particular landscape, comes out of German Romantic nationalism. Originating in the early 19th century in the work of philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Johann Gottfried Herder, it eventually degenerated into the blood-­and-­soil nationalism of Nazi ideologues such as Richard Walther Darré, who in 1930 hymned what might be called an embodied connection to Germany: “The German soul, with all its warmness, is rooted in its native landscape and has, in a sense, always grown out of it … Whoever takes the natural landscape away from the German soul, kills it.”

For Darré, this rootedness in the land meant that Germans could never thrive in cities, among the “rootless ways of thinking of the urbanite.” The rootless urbanite par excellence, for Nazi ideology, was of course the Jew. For Salaita, the exaltation of Palestinian indigeneity leads to the very same conclusion about “Zionists,” who usurp the land but can never be vitally rooted in it: “In their ruthless schema, land is neither pleasure nor sustenance. It is a commodity … Having been anointed Jewish, the land ceases to be dynamic. It is an ideological fabrication with fixed characteristics.”

In this way, anti-Zionism converges with older patterns of anti­-Semitic and anti­-Jewish thinking. It is true, of course, that criticism of Israel is not inherently anti-­Semitic. Virtually anything that an Israeli government does is likely to be harshly criticized by many Israeli Jews themselves. But it is also true that anti-­Semitism is not simply a matter of personal prejudice against Jews, existing on an entirely different plane from politics. The term anti­-Semitism was coined in Germany in the late 19th century because the old term, Jew hatred , sounded too instinctive and brutal to describe what was, in fact, a political ideology—­an account of the way the world works and how it should be changed.

Wilhelm Marr, the German writer who popularized the word, complained in his 1879 book, The Victory of Judaism Over Germanism , that “the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have overpowered the world.” That spirit, for Marr, was materialism and selfishness, “profiteering and usury.” Anti-­Semitic political parties in Europe attacked “Semitism” in the same way that socialists attacked capitalism. The saying “Anti-­Semitism is the socialism of fools,” used by the German left at this time, recognized the structural similarity between these rival worldviews.

The identification of Jews with soulless materialism made sense to 19th-century Europeans because it translated one of the oldest doctrines of Christianity into the language of modern politics. The apostle Paul, a Jew who became a follower of Jesus, explained the difference between his old faith and his new one by identifying Judaism with material things (­the circumcision of the flesh, the letter of the law) and Christianity with spiritual things—­the circumcision of the heart, a new law “written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.”

Simon Sebag Montefiore: The decolonization narrative is dangerous and false

Today this characterization of Jews as stubborn, heartless, and materialistic is seldom publicly expressed in the language of Christianity, as in the Middle Ages, or in the language of race, as in the late 19th century. But it is quite respectable to say exactly the same thing in the language of settler colonialism. As the historian David Nirenberg has written, “We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of ‘Israel,’” except that today, Israel refers not to the Jewish people but to the Jewish state.

When those embracing the ideology of settler colonialism think about political evil, Israel is the example that comes instinctively to hand, just as Jews were for anti-Semitism and Judaism was for Christianity. Perhaps the most troubling reactions to the October 7 attacks were those of college students convinced that the liberation of Palestine is the key to banishing injustice from the world. In November 2023, for instance, Northwestern University’s student newspaper published a letter signed by 65 student organizations—­including the Rainbow Alliance, Ballet Folklórico Northwestern, and All Paws In, which sends volunteers to animal shelters—­defending the use of the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” This phrase looks forward to the disappearance of any form of Jewish state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, but the student groups denied that this entails “murder and genocide.” Rather, they wrote, “When we say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, we imagine a world free of Islamophobia, antisemitism, anti-­Blackness, militarism, occupation and apartheid.”

As a political program, this is nonsensical. How could dismantling Israel bring about the end of militarism in China, Russia, or Iran? How could it lead to the end of anti-Black racism in America, or anti-Muslim prejudice in India? But for the ideology of settler colonialism, actual political conflicts become symbolic battles between light and darkness, and anyone found on the wrong side is a fair target. Young Americans today who celebrate the massacre of Israelis and harass their Jewish peers on college campuses are not ashamed of themselves for the same reason that earlier generations were not ashamed to persecute and kill Jews—because they have been taught that it is an expression of virtue.

This essay is adapted from Adam Kirsch’s new book, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice .

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How To Tackle The Weirdest Supplemental Essay Prompts For This Application Cycle

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Writing the college essay

How do you write a letter to a friend that shows you’re a good candidate for the University of Pennsylvania? What reading list will help the Columbia University admissions committee understand your interdisciplinary interests? How can you convey your desire to attend Yale by inventing a course description for a topic you’re interested in studying?

These are the challenges students must overcome when writing their supplemental essays . Supplemental essays are a critical component of college applications—like the personal statement, they provide students with the opportunity to showcase their authentic voice and perspective beyond the quantitative elements of their applications. However, unlike the personal essay, supplemental essays allow colleges to read students’ responses to targeted prompts and evaluate their candidacy for their specific institution. For this reason, supplemental essay prompts are often abstract, requiring students to get creative, read between the lines, and ditch the traditional essay-writing format when crafting their responses.

While many schools simply want to know “why do you want to attend our school?” others break the mold, inviting students to think outside of the box and answer prompts that are original, head-scratching, or downright weird. This year, the following five colleges pushed students to get creative—if you’re struggling to rise to the challenge, here are some tips for tackling their unique prompts:

University of Chicago

Prompt: We’re all familiar with green-eyed envy or feeling blue, but what about being “caught purple-handed”? Or “tickled orange”? Give an old color-infused expression a new hue and tell us what it represents. – Inspired by Ramsey Bottorff, Class of 2026

What Makes it Unique: No discussion of unique supplemental essay prompts would be complete without mentioning the University of Chicago, a school notorious for its puzzling and original prompts (perhaps the most well-known of these has been the recurring prompt “Find x”). This prompt challenges you to invent a new color-based expression, encouraging both linguistic creativity and a deep dive into the emotional or cultural connotations of color. It’s a prompt that allows you to play with language, think abstractly, and show off your ability to forge connections between concepts that aren’t typically linked—all qualities that likewise demonstrate your preparedness for UChicago’s unique academic environment.

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How to Answer it: While it may be easy to get distracted by the open-ended nature of the prompt, remember that both the substance and structure of your response should give some insight into your personality, perspective, and characteristics. With this in mind, begin by considering the emotions, experiences, or ideas that most resonate with you. Then, use your imagination to consider how a specific color could represent that feeling or concept. Remember that the prompt is ultimately an opportunity to showcase your creativity and original way of looking at the world, so your explanation does not need to be unnecessarily deep or complex—if you have a playful personality, convey your playfulness in your response; if you are known for your sarcasm, consider how you can weave in your biting wit; if you are an amateur poet, consider how you might take inspiration from poetry as you write, or offer a response in the form of a poem.

The goal is to take a familiar concept and turn it into something new and meaningful through a creative lens. Use this essay to showcase your ability to think inventively and to draw surprising connections between language and life.

Harvard University

Prompt: Top 3 things your roommates might like to know about you.

What Makes it Unique: This prompt is unique in both form and substance—first, you only have 150 words to write about all 3 things. Consider using a form other than a traditional essay or short answer response, such as a bullet list or short letter. Additionally, note that the things your roommate might like to learn about you do not necessarily overlap with the things you would traditionally share with an admissions committee. The aim of the prompt is to get to know your quirks and foibles—who are you as a person and a friend? What distinguishes you outside of academics and accolades?

How to Answer it: First and foremost, feel free to get creative with your response to this prompt. While you are producing a supplemental essay and thus a professional piece of writing, the prompt invites you to share more personal qualities, and you should aim to demonstrate your unique characteristics in your own voice. Consider things such as: How would your friends describe you? What funny stories do your parents and siblings share that encapsulate your personality? Or, consider what someone might want to know about living with you: do you snore? Do you have a collection of vintage posters? Are you particularly fastidious? While these may seem like trivial things to mention, the true creativity is in how you connect these qualities to deeper truths about yourself—perhaps your sleepwalking is consistent with your reputation for being the first to raise your hand in class or speak up about a cause you’re passionate about. Perhaps your living conditions are a metaphor for how your brain works—though it looks like a mess to everyone else, you have a place for everything and know exactly where to find it. Whatever qualities you choose, embrace the opportunity to think outside of the box and showcase something that admissions officers won’t learn about anywhere else on your application.

University of Pennsylvania

Prompt: Write a short thank-you note to someone you have not yet thanked and would like to acknowledge.

What Makes it Unique: Breaking from the traditional essay format, this supplement invites you to write directly to a third party in the form of a 150-200 word long letter. The challenge in answering this distinct prompt is to remember that your letter should say as much about you, your unique qualities and what you value as it does about the recipient—all while not seeming overly boastful or contrived.

How to Answer it: As you select a recipient, consider the relationships that have been most formative in your high school experience—writing to someone who has played a large part in your story will allow the admissions committee some insight into your development and the meaningful relationships that guided you on your journey. Once you’ve identified the person, craft a thank-you note that is specific and heartfelt—unlike other essays, this prompt invites you to be sentimental and emotional, as long as doing so would authentically convey your feelings of gratitude. Describe the impact they’ve had on you, what you’ve learned from them, and how their influence has shaped your path. For example, if you’re thanking a teacher, don’t just say they helped you become a better student—explain how their encouragement gave you the confidence to pursue your passions. Keep the tone sincere and personal, avoid clichés and focus on the unique role this person has played in your life.

University of Notre Dame

Prompt: What compliment are you most proud of receiving, and why does it mean so much to you?

What Makes it Unique: This prompt is unique in that it invites students to share something about themselves by reflecting on someone else’s words in 50-100 words.

How to Answer it: The key to answering this prompt is to avoid focusing too much on the complement itself and instead focus on your response to receiving it and why it was so important to you. Note that this prompt is not an opportunity to brag about your achievements, but instead to showcase what truly matters to you. Select a compliment that truly speaks to who you are and what you value. It could be related to your character, work ethic, kindness, creativity, or any other quality that you hold in high regard. The compliment doesn’t have to be grand or come from someone with authority—it could be something small but significant that left a lasting impression on you, or it could have particular meaning for you because it came from someone you didn’t expect it to come from. Be brief in setting the stage and explaining the context of the compliment—what is most important is your reflection on its significance and how it shaped your understanding of yourself.

Stanford University

Prompt: List five things that are important to you.

What Makes it Unique: This prompt’s simplicity is what makes it so challenging. Stanford asks for a list, not an essay, which means you have very limited space (50 words) to convey something meaningful about yourself. Additionally, the prompt does not specify what these “things” must be—they could be a physical item, an idea, a concept, or even a pastime. Whatever you choose, these five items should add depth to your identity, values, and priorities.

How to Answer it: Start by brainstorming what matters most to you—these could be values, activities, people, places, or even abstract concepts. The key is to choose items or concepts that, when considered together, provide a comprehensive snapshot of who you are. For example, you might select something tangible and specific such as “an antique telescope gifted by my grandfather” alongside something conceptual such as “the willingness to admit when you’re wrong.” The beauty of this prompt is that it doesn’t require complex sentences or elaborate explanations—just a clear and honest reflection of what you hold dear. Be thoughtful in your selections, and use this prompt to showcase your creativity and core values.

While the supplemental essays should convey something meaningful about you, your values, and your unique qualifications for the university to which you are applying, the best essays are those that are playful, original, and unexpected. By starting early and taking the time to draft and revise their ideas, students can showcase their authentic personalities and distinguish themselves from other applicants through their supplemental essays.

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Guest Essay

Democrats Have a Josh Shapiro Problem

By James Kirchick

Mr. Kirchick is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.”

One reason Kamala Harris is on the Democratic ticket is because of her identity. One reason Josh Shapiro isn’t on the ticket is because of his.

In March 2020, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden declared that he would choose a woman as his running mate. The following month, after Mr. Biden became the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee, multiple news outlets started reporting on the “pressure” influential Democrats were applying to ensure that the woman he chose would be Black.

Ms. Harris’s race and gender were not the only reasons Mr. Biden chose her. She served as attorney general of the country’s most populous state and had been a senator for four years.

But it’s disingenuous to argue that race and gender played no role in her advancement.

The matter of identity arose again in this year’s Democratic veep stakes, but in a subtler, more insidious way. In this case, the candidate in question doesn’t possess an identity trait preferred by the left, but one the left increasingly views with suspicion.

Among the possible reasons Ms. Harris chose Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota over Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, according to a report in The Times, was that Mr. Shapiro’s selection could “inflame the left.” And chief among the reasons given for this potential inferno was Mr. Shapiro’s allegedly extreme pro-Israel views. An article in The New Republic called Mr. Shapiro “the one vice-presidential pick who could ruin Democratic unity” and claimed that he “stands out among the current field of potential running mates as being egregiously bad on Palestine.” A writer for Jacobin, a socialist magazine, labeled him a “genocide apologist.” A group of far-left congressional staffers and the Democratic Socialists of America teamed up to produce an open letter demanding that Ms. Harris “say no to Genocide Josh Shapiro for vice president.”

The examples marshaled as evidence of Mr. Shapiro’s “egregiously bad” views on the Middle East were specious. Mr. Shapiro, it was alleged, likened all pro-Palestinian demonstrators to the Ku Klux Klan. In actuality, he singled out extremists who called for Israel’s destruction and threatened violence, and he has stated clearly that “we should be universal in our condemnation of antisemitism, Islamophobia and all forms of hate.” More absurd was the digging up of a column Mr. Shapiro wrote for his college newspaper over 30 years ago arguing that the Palestinians were “too battle-minded” to co-exist with Israel. Mr. Shapiro, who has long supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, appropriately brushed off the column as something he “wrote when I was 20.”

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