Lithuanian orthography employs a
Latin-script alphabet
A Latin-script alphabet (Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet) is an alphabet that uses letters of the Latin script. The 21-letter archaic Latin alphabet and the 23-letter classical Latin alphabet belong to the oldest of this group. The 26-letter ...
of 32 letters, two of which denote sounds not native to the
Lithuanian language
Lithuanian ( ) is an Eastern Baltic language belonging to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is the official language of Lithuania and one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.8 mill ...
. Additionally, it uses five digraphs.
Alphabet
Today, the Lithuanian alphabet consists of 32
letters
Letter, letters, or literature may refer to:
Characters typeface
* Letter (alphabet), a character representing one or more of the sounds used in speech; any of the symbols of an alphabet.
* Letterform, the graphic form of a letter of the alpha ...
. It features an unusual
collation order in that "Y" occurs between I
nosinė (Į) and J.
Acute
Acute may refer to:
Science and technology
* Acute angle
** Acute triangle
** Acute, a leaf shape in the glossary of leaf morphology
* Acute (medicine), a disease that it is of short duration and of recent onset.
** Acute toxicity, the adverse ef ...
,
grave
A grave is a location where a dead body (typically that of a human, although sometimes that of an animal) is buried or interred after a funeral. Graves are usually located in special areas set aside for the purpose of burial, such as grav ...
, and
macron/
tilde
The tilde () or , is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish, which in turn came from the Latin '' titulus'', meaning "title" or "superscription". Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) i ...
accents can mark
stress and
vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word ...
. However, these are generally not used, except in dictionaries and where needed for clarity. In addition, Lithuanian orthography uses five
digraphs (Ch Dz Dž Ie Uo); these function as sequences of two letters for collation purposes. The "Ch" digraph represents a
voiceless velar fricative
The voiceless velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It was part of the consonant inventory of Old English and can still be found in some dialects of English, most notably in Scottish English, e.g. in ''loc ...
, while the others are straightforward compositions of their component letters. The letters F and H, as well as the digraph CH, denote sounds only appearing in
loanword
A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because ...
s. Q (kū), w (vė dviguboji) and x (iks) are only used in foreign names. For foreign names, two spelling variants are used: original spelling (e. g. ''George Walker Bush'' as a title of an encyclopedic article or as a name of an author of a book, or ''George'as Walkeris Bushas'' in a sentence, conform to the Lithuanian morphology) and phonetic spelling adapted to the Lithuanian phonology (e. g. ''Džordžas Volkeris Bušas''). In Soviet times, phonetic spelling was the only standard way to write foreign names in Lithuanian (original spelling could be shown in parentheses if needed), but in post-Soviet times the original spelling came to be widely used. The
Lithuanian Wikipedia uses original spelling in article titles, but phonetic spelling in article texts.
Sound–spelling correspondences
is short only in loanwords. are always short without accent and under accent in endings ''-a'', ''-e'', ''-es'', in comparative, in pronouns, and in loanwords; otherwise, they are usually long.
Consonants are always palatalized before ; before , palatalization is denoted by inserting an between the consonant and the vowel.
Unicode
The majority of the Lithuanian alphabet is in the Unicode block
C0 controls and basic Latin
The Basic Latin or C0 Controls and Basic Latin Unicode block is the first block of the Unicode standard, and the only block which is encoded in one byte in UTF-8. The block contains all the letters and control codes of the ASCII encoding. It ...
(non-accented symbols), and the rest of the Lithuanian alphabet (ą Ą č Č ę Ę ė Ė į Į š Š ų Ų ū Ū ž Ž) is in the
Latin Extended-A.
See also
*
Lithuanian phonology
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lithuanian Orthography
Lithuanian language
Indo-European Latin-script orthographies