The Sorbian alphabet is based on the

ISO basic Latin alphabet The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard (beginning with ISO/IEC 646) for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets (uppercase and lowercase) of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and ...

but uses

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...

s such as the acute accent and the

caron A caron (), háček or haček (, or ; plural ''háčeks'' or ''háčky'') also known as a hachek, wedge, check, kvačica, strešica, mäkčeň, varnelė, inverted circumflex, inverted hat, flying bird, inverted chevron, is a diacritic mark (� ...

, making it similar to the

Czech Czech may refer to: * Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe ** Czech language ** Czechs, the people of the area ** Czech culture ** Czech cuisine * One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus' Places * Czech, ...

and

Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Poles Poles,, ; singular masculine: ''Polak'', singular feminine: ''Polka'' or Polish people, are a West Slavic nation and ethnic group, w ...

alphabets. (This mixture is also found in the

Belarusian Latin alphabet The Belarusian Latin alphabet or Łacinka (from be, лацінка or łacinka, BGN/PCGN: ''Latsinka'', ) for the Latin script in general is the common name for writing Belarusian using Latin script. It is similar to the Sorbian alphabet a ...

.) The standard character encoding for the Sorbian alphabet is

ISO 8859-2 ISO/IEC 8859-2:1999, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 2: Latin alphabet No. 2'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. ...

(Latin-2). The alphabet is used for the

Sorbian languages The Sorbian languages ( hsb, serbska rěč, dsb, serbska rěc) are the Upper Sorbian language and Lower Sorbian language, two closely related and partially mutually intelligible languages spoken by the Sorbs, a West Slavic ethno-cultural min ...

, although some letters are used in only one of the two languages (

Upper Sorbian Upper Sorbian (), occasionally referred to as "Wendish", is a minority language spoken by Sorbs in Germany in the historical province of Upper Lusatia, which is today part of Saxony. It is grouped in the West Slavic language branch, together ...

and

Lower Sorbian Lower may refer to: *Lower (surname) *Lower Township, New Jersey *Lower Receiver (firearms) *Lower Wick Gloucestershire, England See also *Nizhny Nizhny (russian: Ни́жний; masculine), Nizhnyaya (; feminine), or Nizhneye (russian: Ни́� ...

Alphabet table

An earlier version of the Lower Sorbian alphabet included the use of the letters ''b́, ṕ, ḿ, ẃ'' and ''f́'' to indicate palatalized labials. These have been replaced by ''bj, pj, mj'', ''wj'', and ''fj''. Sorbian orthography also includes two digraphs: The digraph ch follows h in alphabetical order.

References

* Jana Šołćina, Edward Wornar: Obersorbisch im Selbststudium, Hornjoserbšćina za samostudij, Bautzen 2000, , Seiten 12–15 * Starosta: Dolnoserbsko-nimski słownik, Niedersorbisch-deutsches Wörterbuch, Bautzen 1999, , Seiten 15–21 {{DEFAULTSORT:Sorbian Alphabet

Alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...

Latin alphabets West Slavic languages Sorbian culture