New Tai Lue script, also known as Xishuangbanna Dai and Simplified Tai Lue, is an

abugida An abugida (, from Ge'ez: ), sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel not ...

used to write the Tai Lü language. Developed in China in the 1950s, New Tai Lue is based on the traditional Tai Tham alphabet developed . The government of China promoted the alphabet for use as a replacement for the older script; teaching the script was not

mandatory Mandate most often refers to: * League of Nations mandates, quasi-colonial territories established under Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, 28 June 1919 * Mandate (politics), the power granted by an electorate Mandate may also r ...

, however, and as a result many are illiterate in New Tai Lue. In addition, communities in

Burma 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 ...

, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam still use the Tai Tham alphabet.

Consonants

Initials

Similar to the Thai and Lao scripts, consonants come in pairs to denote two tonal registers (high and low).

Finals

Final consonants do not have an inherent /a/ vowel. They are modified forms of initials with a virama-like hook:

Vowels

Consonants have a default vowel of /a/. In the table below, '◌' represents a consonant and is used to indicate the position of the various vowels: In some words, the symbol is just used for distinguishing

homonyms In linguistics, homonyms are words which are homographs (words that share the same spelling, regardless of pronunciation), or homophones (equivocal words, that share the same pronunciation, regardless of spelling), or both. Using this definition, ...

or displaying

onomatopoeiae Onomatopoeia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as ''oink'', '' ...

. Generally, vowels in

open syllables A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological " ...

(without final) become long whereas ones in

closed syllables A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological " ...

become short (except and ).

Tones

New Tai Lue has two tone marks which are written at the end of a syllable: and . Because consonants come in pairs to denote two tonal registers, the two tone marks allow for representation of six specific tones:

Abbreviations

Two letters are used only for abbreviations: * Syllable (/lɛʔ˧/, "and", "or") can be abbreviated as the character * Syllable (/lɛu˩/, "already") can be abbreviated as the character

Digits

New Tai Lue has its own set of digits: An alternative glyph for one () is used when might be confused with the vowel .

Unicode

New Tai Lue script was added to the Unicode Standard in March, 2005 with the release of version 4.1. In June 2015, New Tai Lue was changed from an ISCII-style logical ordering (where vowel modifiers are always encoded after the base consonants which they modify), as used for most Indic scripts in Unicode, to a

TIS-620 Thai Industrial Standard 620-2533, commonly referred to as TIS-620, is the most common character set and character encoding for the Thai language. The standard is published by the Thai Industrial Standards Institute (TISI), an organ of the Min ...

-style visual ordering model (where a vowel modifier will be encoded before the base consonant if it appears before it in the line, or after it otherwise), as used for the Thai and Lao scripts. This change was made since visual ordering for New Tai Lue was found to be more widespread in practice than the previously-prescribed logical ordering. This change affected the four vowel letters which appear to the left of the initial consonant. The Unicode block for New Tai Lue is U+1980–U+19DF:

References

{{list of writing systems Alphabets Brahmic scripts Tai languages