Maldivian (also known as Divehi) is spoken on the Maldive Islands located off the southwest tip of India in the Indian Ocean. It is an Indo-Aryan language, formerly written in a script resembling Sinhalese script. After the islands became exclusively Islamic, it was found convenient to design a script reading from right to left, so that Arabic words could be accommodated in Maldivian sentences. An official scheme of roman transliteration for Maldivian was adopted by the Maldive government in the 1970s. This Maldivian-English Dictionary consists of 5000 individual entries.