Lithuanian orthography

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Lithuanian orthography employs a Latin-script alphabet of 32 letters, two of which denote sounds not native to the Lithuanian language. Additionally, it uses five digraphs.

Alphabet[]

Today, the Lithuanian alphabet consists of 32 letters. It features an unusual collation order in that "Y" occurs between I nosinė (Į) and J.

Acute, grave, and macron/tilde accents can mark stress and vowel length. 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, 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 loanwords. 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[]

⟨o⟩ is short only in loanwords. ⟨a e⟩ are always short without accent and under accent in endings -a, -e, -es, in comparative, in pronouns and in loanwords, and besides usually long.^[1]

Consonants are always palatalized before ⟨e ę ė i į y⟩; before ⟨a ą o u ų ū⟩, palatalization is denoted by inserting an ⟨i⟩ between the consonant and the vowel.

Unicode[]

The majority of the Lithuanian alphabet is in the Unicode block C0 controls and basic Latin (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[]