Marginalized and Misunderstood: How Anti‑Rohingya Language… 295 to give up identity papers in the late 1980s to obtain colored-coded Citizenship Scrutiny Cards (“pink cards”), but most Rohingyas were only given Temporary Registration Cards (so-called white cards) after 1995; these were then canceled in February 2015. In June 2015, new green cards were distributed to people who were “ready to be scrutinized for citizenship under conditions that denied them self-identification as Rohingyas” (Leider 2018, pp. 14). This vital link between “national races” and citizenship has forced people to think strategically about their identities in order to return to the political community. Cheesman (2017) writes that the only way available to the Rohingya politically and as a collectivity “is to submit to the politics of domination inherent in the national races project, and insist that they too are taingyintha. This is exactly what Rohingya advocates have done, causing them to become the targets of much anger from the members of other communities” (pp. 473). In terms of language, the Rohingya language represents an extremely small linguistic minority in Myanmar, where the Burmese language has an estimated 36 million native speakers. Approximately 78% of the country’s population speaks a language in the Tibeto-Burman family (including Burmese and a variety of other languages associated with national ethnic groups such as the Kachin and Naga), while 9% speak Tai-Kadai (Shan) and 7% speak Austro-Asiatic (Mon-Khmer) languages (McCormick 2019, pp. 244). Rohingya belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, which is more closely related to Hindi/Urdu (or even English) than it is to Burmese. (Technically, Burmese is a Tibeto-Burman language that can be further classified as Sino-Tibetan.) The Rohingya language is linguistically similar to Chittagonian, spoken in the neighboring Chittagong Division of Bangladesh (Hoque 2015), but they are still distinct languages. The fact that Rohingya is recognized by linguists as a distinct language (Eberhard et al. 2021) supports the classification of the Rohingya as a distinct ethnic group (Lindblom et al. 2015, pp. 42). Just as there are many factors working against the vitality of the Rohingya people, there are many factors working against the continuing vitality of the Rohingya language. Most likely due to a history of continuous displacement and the dispersal of its speakers, Rohingya has remained primarily an oral language despite attempts to create a system of literacy. When communities of speakers are dispersed and unsettled, they are less able to produce a cohesive literature. The fact that Rohingya has multiple writing systems also possibly contributes to its detriment as a robust written language while confirming its linguistic status as a viable language. These writing systems include an Arabic script and a more recently developed Hanifi Rohingya script, which is a blend of Arabic, Burmese, and Latin scripts. Rohingyalish is another modern writing system that uses the Roman script (unlike Arabic, Urdu, Hanifi-Script, and Burmese), and is available for use on computers unlike Hanifi (Eberhard et al. 2021). Hanifi Rohingya has been included in a 2019 upgrade to the Unicode Standard, a global encoding system that changes written script into digital characters and numbers, so that Rohingya can now email, text, and post to social media in their own language (Pandey 2016; Abraham and Jaehn 2019). (This is discussed below.) 13