The Kayah Li alphabet (Kayah Li: ) is used to write the

Kayah languages Karenni or Red Karen (Kayah Li: ; my, ကရင်နီ), known in Burmese as Kayah ( my, ကယား), is a Karen dialect continuum spoken by over half a million Kayah people (Red Karen) in Burma. The name ''Kayah'' has been described as " ...

Eastern Kayah Li Karenni or Red Karen (Kayah Li: ; my, ကရင်နီ), known in Burmese as Kayah ( my, ကယား), is a Karen dialect continuum spoken by over half a million Kayah people (Red Karen) in Burma. The name ''Kayah'' has been described as " ...

and

Western Kayah Li Karenni or Red Karen (Kayah Li: ; my, ကရင်နီ), known in Burmese as Kayah ( my, ကယား), is a Karen dialect continuum spoken by over half a million Kayah people (Red Karen) in Burma. The name ''Kayah'' has been described as " ...

, which are members of Karenic branch of the

Sino-Tibetan language family Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. ...

. They are also known as Red Karen and

Karenni Karenni may refer to: * Karenni people * Karenni language * Karenni State, former name of Kayah State, Myanmar * Karenni States The Karenni States, also known as Red Karen States, was the name formerly given to the states inhabited mainly by ...

. Eastern Kayah Li is spoken by about 26,000 people, and Western Kayah Li by about 100,000 people, mostly in the Kayah and Karen states of

Myanmar Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John Wells explai ...

, but also by people living in

Thailand Thailand ( ), historically known as Siam () and officially the Kingdom of Thailand, is a country in Southeast Asia, located at the centre of the Indochinese Peninsula, spanning , with a population of almost 70 million. The country is b ...

History

Kayah Li script was devised by Htae Bu Phae in March 1962, in part in response to the appearance of Latin-based orthographies which had appeared after 1950. It is taught in schools in refugee camps in Thailand. Kayah Li’s relation to

Brahmic scripts The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient Ind ...

can be seen in its ordering and the shapes of some of its letters, although the shapes of most of them were developed independently. At least nine of its characters bear a relation to characters in the

Myanmar script Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John C. Wells, Joh ...

Description

Unlike the

, the Kayah Li script is an alphabet proper as the consonant letters do not have any subsequent vowel. Four of the vowels are written with separate letter, the others are written using a combination of the letter for ''a'' and a diacritic marker. The diacritics can also be used in combination with the letter for ''ơ'' to represent sounds occurring in loanwords. There is also a set of three diacritics that are used to indicate tone. Unlike the vowel diacritics, that are written above the letter, these are written under.

Vowels

Vowels used for loanwords

Tone markers

Consonants

Digits

Unicode

Kayah Li was added to the

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

Standard in April, 2008 with the release of version 5.1. The Unicode block for Kayah Li is U+A900–U+A92F:

External links

Page on Omniglot about Kayah Li

Unicode Kayah Li chart

GNU FreeFont
a Unicode font with support for Kayah Li

References

* {{list of writing systems Alphabets Karenic languages