Fading Dhivehi language finds unlikely ally in Rap

Pest having a moment with the crowd in a performance at Meedhoo, Addu Atoll. Photo: Youshau

First appeared on brownhistory

On the island of Maduvvari in Raa Atoll, a three-hour journey from the Maldivian capital, Male, a young boy sits in a joali in his yard.

“You know what the best film is?” he asks in an American accent. When I say “no”, he beams. “Pacific Rim. It has robots and monsters.”

His father, Ali Hameed, stocky and seated on a low wall bounding a plot of non-native plants, is listening to a song on his iPhone’s speakers. It’s Dhunthari, a popular track by Pest, the nation’s most famous rapper. Hameed looks at me.

“You and I, we didn’t grow up in front of a TV, kokko,” he speaks in Dhivehi, dispiritedly. “If we had, we would probably be talking in English like Sofwan.”

Sofwan Hameed understands Dhivehi, the Maldives’ millennia-old language and close relative of Sinhala, the language of our neighbour Sri Lanka. Yet he doesn’t speak or write Dhivehi well. Despite our language being a compulsory subject at all public schools, this has not prevented English from becoming the default language of our children and youth.

The change happened almost overnight – propelled by tourism, our sleepy archipelago was pushed into modernity in the 70s. In a decade, tourism earnings eclipsed the revenue of fisheries, our ancestral industry. Flush with tourism cash, investments poured into mass communication technologies. And in the late 1990s and 2000s, the internet and cable TV became more accessible to Male’s growing middleclass. In this new ecosystem, Dhivehi struggled to find a home in the speech of Maldivian children.

As children, most of my generation only saw cartoons on state-owned Television Maldives (TVM), the sole TV channel, between 5:30pm and the Maghrib prayer call. It created a precious window of forty-five minutes to sit by the TV with the extended family. In contrast, Gen Z children had access to uninterrupted material from Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. They learned to laugh like Spongebob Squarepants and American accents crept into their Dhivehi mouths, barring entry to their native language from a tender age.

Compounding this, local literature and shows on radio and TV presented a language that was too flowery and detached from reality, further alienating younger audiences.

For example, a typical TV dialogue might say ‘Ahmed, I have prepared the morning meal with my own hands so you may eat it,’ in a strange, almost sing-song intonation, clearly not how people speak in real life.

At the same time, government institutions’ official communications were in Dhivehi – young employees fresh from school and college often had to take a crash course in their native language to fit in. The highest register of Dhivehi, emme maaiy bas, is still the language of state institutions. However, in and out of the office, young people conversed in English to the dismay of their older superiors. The generation gap in government offices is along a fault line of language: English against Dhivehi.

Two decades ago, it was clear: Dhivehi wasn’t hip with the youth.

But the explosion of Dhivehi rap in the 2010s put our language, spoken by less than half a million, back in the spotlight. The subject matter, rhymes and rhythms of the artform, and the raw, magnetic personas of the rappers themselves, made Dhivehi sound cool again to a swathe of the country’s young people.

“I got into local rap listening to Jamaal on Soundcloud,” recalls Izan Hassan, a 25-year-old artist who teaches visual art at a local college. “I thought it was just radical, because he was swearing and you never hear that kind of language in Dhivehi songs. It felt very real.”

Back then, Izan was a skater and conversed in English with most of his friends, but spurred by this encounter he began to explore Dhivehi hip-hop.

“What I noticed about a lot of the rap at the time, including Jamaal’s, was that it often broke away from the inherent rhythm of the words, and not intentionally. It wasn’t great songwriting, but it was shocking, fresh, it wasn’t like anything out there.”

Izan soon wanted more, a deeper connection to the form, and this is exactly what he found in the work of Pest.

Edil performs for a rapt crowd in Meedhoo. Photo: Youshau

“Pest was easy to follow,” explains Izan. “He had a great flow, he didn’t throw around big words to sound profound. He had a clear message.”

Izan’s favourite is Pest’s track Oyaa, a song beloved by thousands of young Maldivians. It describes a harsh lightless life that resonates with many disadvantaged youth.

“I think it’s his most relatable track, to me: he’s just baring his feelings,” he says. “And I think that’s what drew a lot of us to him, that he could express his innermost self and be vulnerable, which a lot of people our age could relate to.”

In Pest’s verses, generations of young Maldivians found Dhivehi as it was meant to be: clever, contemporary, accessible, and full of feeling.

And it’s no accident: Pest formally studied poetry at the Dhivehi Bahuge Academy, the state institution tasked with preserving our language.

“There are good Dhivehi poets, there’s no question about that,” Pest tells me over coffee. He speaks quietly, after deliberation, a rarity among the youth. “But there’s nothing that connects them to the wider public. They have no impact outside that institution.”

Pest’s intent was clear: he wanted to make an impact on the average person with a language that they would easily understand. He grew up with a love for Dhivehi, reading books of poetry to entertain himself at home in Fuvahmulah, just above Addu Atoll in the far south. The dialect of Fuvahmulah is not easily understood by people from atolls up north. In the late 1950s, Fuvahmulah was one of the three southernmost atolls that seceded from the rest of the Maldives to form the short-lived United Suvadive Republic. 

Symbolic Records, the record label of Pest and his crew, operates from a small apartment in a run-down building that houses migrant workers. It’s an unlikely HQ perhaps for the Maldives’ most popular rapper but here he lives the life he describes in his songs. In its spartan rooms, the crew, mostly migrants from the South, sleeps, works, and has drawn out conversations over cigarettes and coffee. A few of them are very young and unemployed but they are taken care of by the label through income from their live gigs and commercial work.

Pest released his long-awaited debut solo album, L2, early in 2025 to widespread acclaim. Another Symbolic member, Maatu, is almost done with his second LP. Maatu had released an album, Maarokaa, in 2018, during the last year of President Abdulla Yameen’s authoritarian administration. In this landscape Maatu’s album was at home. His witty political commentary and experimental music production along with an urban graffiti marketing campaign worked in tandem to make the album a success. It hit with many who felt the degeneracy of the Yameen administration had plunged local politics to new lows.

Symbolic Records is not the only hip-hop label in this bite-sized capital, though. A rival label, Blueberry Waters, was formed by Danny and Sallu, longtime friends of the Symbolic crew. When we meet, Danny is quick to point out that the language in his songs is not meant to shock but to show ‘the language of the streets’ to the everyday person.

“It’s not necessarily the kind of language that was spoken in our homes, but it was real,” he says. “Our communities pretend that it doesn’t exist, they are in denial. Us using the street language was an act of rebellion.”

And the audience of Blueberry Waters lapped this up – most of them at the time were teens and twenties.

“For some people, our music was their introduction to hip-hop,” laughs Danny. “They only got into Kanye and Kendrick Lamar through us.”  

His labelmate and collaborator Sallu is the youngest rapper among the mostly younger millennial hip-hop artists. Privately schooled, Dhivehi was not Sallu’s strongest suit.

“His phrasing is unique,” Pest tells me one night over a simple dinner. “I mean, it’s not technically correct sometimes, and many linguists here would fault that. But you’d get the gist.”

Sallu, (whom I was unable to meet) initially rapped in English, and Danny and Pest both believe their friend brought many linguistic devices common in English, like wordplay, into Dhivehi rap.

“In the early days, Sallu would call me up and ask the meanings of words,” recalls Danny. “Sallu essentially learned Dhivehi through his passion for rap and songwriting.” And this seems a common theme with many youths in the city.

In late November, I walk with a young artist and poet, Mohamed Haikal Hassan, 27, through the narrow streets of Maafannu, the Western district of Male. On both sides of the street loom the ward’s colourful buildings, some narrow wedges with rusted iron balconies, others tall, broad and opulent, monuments to the inequality that’s often the subject matter of our rappers.

“I listen to Pest for the poetry,” says Haikal. “I like Thuththu Park and Danny’s flow better, though, and love the playfulness in Blueberry Waters’ music.”

Haikal is fluent in both Dhivehi and English but this wasn’t always the case. Rap helped him reconnect with a language that he had felt incapable of giving voice to deeply personal feelings and experiences. To his surprise, he found these described in natural yet poetic language in the work of Pest, Danny, Thuthu Park and others.

Later that evening, as I ride home in a cab from Hulhumale, the driver plays one of Pest’s tracks on the car stereo. Curious, I ask him if he likes the rapper.

“Of course,” he says. “He speaks facts in a language everyone gets.”

The cab driver is a Gen Z police officer who makes a bit of money on the side with Avas Ride, the Maldives’ equivalent of Uber.

“I especially love Pest’s more romantic stuff,” he adds, before returning to singing along with the song on the stereo. “He knows what real heartbreak is,” he says when the music stops. “Pest can express it beautifully.”

It seems even police officers are not immune to the charms of Pest and the Symbolic Crew, whose audience consists largely of younger Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha – together, they comprise more than 60 percent of listeners according to YouTube’s analytics.

Pest and Panda making the crowd go nuts. Photo credit: Youshau

On a bright December morning, I sit with Nazim Sattar at a small, stylish café in Henveiru. Nazim is a linguist and former lecturer at the Maldives National University (MNU), and we are having a chat about the poetic merits and significance of Pest’s rap. Up for discussion is a particular track on his latest album: Gang Miee. In it, Pest describes a two-faced system that produces, empowers, utilises, and finally condemns gangs.

Nazim observes that the wazan (closely related to the English ‘meter’) employed by Pest in the song’s chorus is the Arabic:

(Fu-'ū-Lu) wazan. It may be thought of as words that fall into the rhythmic pattern du-doo-du. He believes the rapper has adapted Arabic word formation principles to create a clever, stylistically cohesive, and melodic rhyme scheme. In this case, the rhyming words appearing at the end of each line are:

Shuooru (Šu-’ū-Ru: sentiment)

Nufoozu (Nu-Fū-Zu: influence)

Usoolu (‘u- Sū-Lu: principle)

Vujoodhu (Wu-Jū-Du: existence)

Sukoolu (Su-Kū-Lu: school)

and

Sulooku (Su-Lū-Ku: conduct).

In the penultimate line, Pest uses the same rhythmic pattern to playfully transform the borrowed English word ‘school’ to ‘sukoolu’. This word, easily understood by Maldivian audiences, is also a Dhivehi anagram of the final rhyming word ‘sulooku.’

“I also feel that because of the subject matter, Pest is using formal Arabic words to give the song a sense of gravitas,” adds Nazim.

I tell him it feels incredible that our language and script have existed to this day and in this form. Especially since middleclass Gen-X and older Gen-Y parents were encouraged their children to speak in English because they themselves were often poor speakers and writers. A good command of English signalled status and learning and meant significantly better pay especially in the private sector. English carried enormous cultural capital, reshaping even our voices – it’s been decades since TV and radio presenters began to affect accents distinct from the typical Maldivian one.

Dhivehi has managed to survive without becoming creole, Nazim thinks, because we have had a written language and script for centuries. “Also, the written language was incredibly conservative,” he explains. “HCP Bell [a British archaeologist] said that even in the 19^th century, the deeds sent from Male to the Southern atolls had to be written in the older Dives Akuru script, because the Southerners wouldn’t recognise Thaana, the present-day script, as official, despite Thaana being declared official in the preceding century.”

That the rap revolution was orchestrated by a band of young men from the South may not be simple serendipity but indicative of something deeper, a resistance below the equator to the weathering effects of globalisation on language. And the clear fact that a new poetic form borrowed from the United States is thriving in the Maldives indicates the resilience of our language in the face of greater, richer languages. As Pest and the Symbolic Crew concludes the Vybe Fest, a music festival to mark the close of the year, the enduring popularity of Dhivehi rap among our youth tells us, with the conceit of a Pest-ian verse, that there is much to celebrate in and about our small island nation’s native tongue.

Although rap is snubbed by the literary establishment, it is not the poetry of the Bahuge Academy that’s drawing the youth to our language. As Pest says in the opener of L2: ‘Just as a tree might be made into a smaller, unrealised version of itself our thoughts too ‘become bonsai’ because of the system’ – ie our material circumstances which favour a certain class at the expense of ordinary people. But for now, rap is like peat from our coconut palms feeding the roots of a small language that refuses to shrink and disappear.