Georgian Alphabet & Letters

Georgian is written in an alphabet of its own, used for no other language except its Kartvelian relatives such as Mingrelian and Svan. The modern script is called Mkhedruli, and its 33 letters run ა ბ გ დ ე ვ ზ თ ი კ ლ მ ნ ო პ ჟ რ ს ტ უ ფ ქ ღ ყ შ ჩ ც ძ წ ჭ ხ ჯ ჰ. Each letter has a name, ani, bani, gani, doni and so on to hae, and each writes one sound, so a Georgian word is read exactly as it is spelled: თბილისი is Tbilisi, საქართველო Sakartvelo, the Georgians' own name for their country, and ქართული kartuli, the Georgian language.

There are no accents, no dots and no letters that change shape at the end of a word: the 33 letters are all there is. Five are vowels, ა a, ე e, ი i, ო o, უ u, and the other 28 are consonants. The order goes back to the Greek alphabet (ა ბ გ დ ე matches alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon), with most of the sounds Greek lacks placed after the Greek letters, and like Greek letters the old Georgian ones also served as numbers.

When Georgian is written in Latin letters, the official romanization of 2002 uses an apostrophe for the ejective consonants: კ k', პ p', ტ t', ყ q', წ ts', ჭ ch', against plain k, p, t for ქ ფ თ. Everyday Latin spelling, on passports, menus and in chat, usually leaves the apostrophes out, so khinkali, Tbilisi and gamarjoba are written without them.

Georgian letters and pronunciation: ejectives and long consonant clusters

Georgian keeps three kinds of stop consonants apart. ბ დ გ are voiced, as in English b, d, g. ფ თ ქ, and the affricates ც ჩ, are said with a puff of air, like English p, t, k at the start of a word. პ ტ კ, and წ ჭ, are ejectives: the throat closes and the sound pops out sharply, with no breath behind it. Swapping one for another changes the word: კარი k'ari is a door, but ქარი kari is the wind.

A few letters write sounds English lacks altogether. ყ q' is an ejective made far back in the throat, as in ყავა q'ava, coffee. ღ gh is a voiced throaty sound, close to a French r: ღვინო ghvino, wine. ხ kh is the rasping sound of Scottish loch: ხაჭაპური khach'ap'uri. ჟ is the zh of measure, შ sh, ძ dz and ჯ j. რ is always rolled, and ჰ is a plain h.

Georgian is famous for stacking consonants. მწვრთნელი mts'vrtneli, a coach or trainer, opens with six consonants before its first vowel, and გვფრცქვნი gvprtskvni, 'you peel us', has eight in a row. Two words every visitor learns are pleasantly short, though: დედა deda means mother and მამა mama means father.

Does Georgian have capital letters? Mkhedruli vs Mtavruli

Everyday Georgian has no capitals. Sentences, names and countries all begin with the same letters as the rest of the text: ნინო ცხოვრობს თბილისში, Nino lives in Tbilisi. The capital letters on this page are Mtavruli, an all-capitals form of the same alphabet used the way English uses SMALL CAPS or block letters: for headlines, shop signs, book covers and monuments, always for whole words, never just for the first letter: ᲒᲐᲛᲐᲠᲯᲝᲑᲐ, ᲡᲐᲥᲐᲠᲗᲕᲔᲚᲝ.

Before Unicode 11.0 (2018), Mtavruli was a style of Mkhedruli, not separately encoded letters; plain-text copying could therefore lose the styling. Unicode 11.0 encoded Mtavruli as separate characters (U+1C90 to U+1CBF), with Ა as the capital of ა, so text in capitals now stays capitals wherever it is pasted. Unicode also made a deliberate exception: converting ა to upper case gives Ა, but 'capitalize the first letter' leaves Georgian unchanged, because Georgian sentences do not start with a capital.

That makes the second column of the table useful for designers and for anyone writing a heading, a tattoo or a username in Georgian capitals. For ordinary sentences, messages and names, use the first column. Older phones and some fonts still have no Mtavruli shapes and show empty boxes, so check that a heading in capitals displays where it will be read.

How to type Georgian letters on a keyboard and phone

Windows: Settings, Time & language, Language & region, Add a language, Georgian, then pick the Georgian (QWERTY) keyboard and switch with Windows + Space. Mac: System Settings, Keyboard, Input Sources, add Georgian – QWERTY. The QWERTY layout is phonetic: a gives ა, b ბ, g გ, d დ, and most letters sit on their Latin sound-alike (k კ, p პ, t ტ, q ქ, f ფ, x ხ, c ც, j ჯ, y ყ, w წ). Shift gives the rest: T თ, W ჭ, R ღ, S შ, C ჩ, Z ძ, J ჟ.

Phones: on an iPhone add Georgian in Settings, General, Keyboard, Keyboards; on Android add Georgian in Gboard's Languages. Most keyboards type only the everyday Mkhedruli letters; for Mtavruli capitals, the old letters ჱ ჲ ჳ ჴ ჵ and the lari sign ₾, copying from this page is the quick way.

Word: type a code and press Alt+X, for example 10D0 Alt+X for ა or 20BE Alt+X for ₾. HTML: the Mkhedruli letters run from ა (ა) to ჰ (ჰ), the Mtavruli from Ა (Ა), and ₾ is ₾. Many Georgians chat in Latin letters, gamarjoba, madloba, but anything official, or written to grandparents, reads right only in Georgian letters.

Old Georgian letters, the three scripts and Georgian punctuation

The alphabet once had more letters. ჱ he, ჲ hie, ჳ vie, ჴ hari and ჵ hoe were dropped in the late 19th century, in the spelling reform led by Ilia Chavchavadze and the Society for the Spreading of Literacy among Georgians, because their sounds had merged with other letters or were written with two. They still appear in church books, old manuscripts and reprints of older texts. Other extra letters, such as ჷ and ჸ, belong to Mingrelian and Svan, which are written with Georgian letters; see the Mingrelian collection.

Mkhedruli is the youngest of three Georgian scripts. Asomtavruli, the rounded capitals of the oldest inscriptions from the 5th century, and Nuskhuri, the angular script of medieval church books, are still used in the Georgian Orthodox Church and in decoration; Mkhedruli grew up beside them and became the script for everything else. UNESCO added the living culture of all three to its intangible heritage list in 2016. Who created the alphabet is still debated: Georgian chronicles credit King Parnavaz, an Armenian tradition credits Mesrop Mashtots, and scholars have not settled it.

Georgian quotation marks open low and close high: „გამარჯობა“, written with „ and “. Full stops, commas, question and exclamation marks are the same as in English. ჻, the Georgian paragraph separator, was historically used to delimit manuscript text elements at about the paragraph level. The lari sign ₾, built from the letter ლ, was introduced by the National Bank of Georgia in 2014 and added to Unicode in 2015; it is written after the amount, 20 ₾.

Where Georgian is spoken

Georgian is spoken by about 4.3 million people by CLDR's estimate, almost all of them in Georgia 🇬🇪, where it is the official language. Its own family, the Kartvelian languages, is not related to its neighbours: Georgian is neither Indo-European like Russian, Armenian and Ossetic, which are also spoken in Georgia, nor Turkic like Azerbaijani. See the Georgia collection for the flag, the five crosses, khachapuri and the other emoji of the country.

Old Georgian-speaking communities live outside the country too. In Iran 🇮🇷, the Georgians of Fereydan, near Isfahan, descend from people resettled there in the early 17th century and still speak Georgian; CLDR estimates about 60,000 speakers in Iran and about 50,000 in Türkiye 🇹🇷, where Georgian is spoken near the Georgian border and in villages settled by 19th-century migrants, though other counts for Türkiye run much higher. Further abroad, estimates put the number of Georgians at around 120,000 in the United States 🇺🇸 and 110,000 in Russia 🇷🇺, with further communities in Greece, Germany, Israel and Spain.

Georgians celebrate their language every year on 14 April, the Day of the Georgian Language, remembering the demonstrations of 14 April 1978, when crowds in Tbilisi forced the Soviet authorities to keep Georgian as the state language of the Georgian republic.