Irish Alphabet & Fada Letters

Irish (Gaeilge) is a Celtic language written in the Latin alphabet, and its traditional alphabet is short: just 18 letters, A B C D E F G H I L M N O P R S T U. Native words have no j, k, q, v, w, x, y or z; those letters turn up only in loanwords, names and technical terms such as vóta (vote) and x-gha (X-ray).

The one accent is the fada (síneadh fada, “long mark”), an acute accent that sits on the five vowels: Á É Í Ó Ú and á é í ó ú. It is part of the spelling, not decoration: leaving it out changes the word. Seán is a name, sean means old; féar is grass, fear is a man. Capitals keep it too: ÉIRE, BAILE ÁTHA CLIATH.

Much of what looks strange in Irish spelling comes from the initial mutations. Lenition adds an h after the first consonant (máthair, mother, becomes mo mháthair, my mother), and eclipsis puts another letter in front (i mBaile Átha Cliath, in Dublin). In front of a capital the added letter stays small, so i nÉirinn (in Ireland), na hÉireann (of Ireland) and an tUachtarán (the President) are all correct; before a small vowel, n- and t- take a hyphen: an t-uisce (the water), ár n-athair (our father).

Irish fada letters: what á, é, í, ó and ú do

A fada makes the vowel long. á is the open ah of tá (is) and Seán; é is close to the ay of English day, as in Éire (Ireland) and sé (he); í is ee, as in sí (she) and Róisín; ó is oh, as in bó (cow); ú is oo, as in tú (you). Unlike the Spanish accent, the Irish fada does not mark stress; it marks length, and the exact sounds vary between the Ulster, Connacht and Munster dialects.

The fada always leans forward, like a slash: á, never the backward-leaning grave à. It is a frequent question because Scottish Gaelic, a close relative of Irish, uses grave accents in its modern spelling (fàilte), while Irish writes fáilte (welcome).

Names are where people meet the fada most: Seán, Siobhán, Máire, Pádraig, Ciarán, Róisín, Éabha. For the surname O’Brien, Ó gives the male form Ó Briain, Ní the daughter form Ní Bhriain, and Uí the wife form Uí Bhriain. In Unicode the fada letters are single precomposed characters: Á U+00C1, á U+00E1, É U+00C9, é U+00E9, Í U+00CD, í U+00ED, Ó U+00D3, ó U+00F3, Ú U+00DA, ú U+00FA.

How to type a fada on a keyboard, Mac, iPhone or Android

Windows: with the UK or Irish keyboard layout, hold AltGr (the right Alt key) and press the vowel: AltGr + a gives á, AltGr + Shift + a gives Á. On any layout you can hold Alt and type on the number pad: á 0225, é 0233, í 0237, ó 0243, ú 0250, Á 0193, É 0201, Í 0205, Ó 0211, Ú 0218. In Microsoft Word, Ctrl + ' (apostrophe) and then the vowel also works.

Mac: press Option + E, let go, then type the vowel (add Shift for a capital), or hold the vowel key and pick the accented letter from the pop-up. The Irish Extended input source in System Settings lets you type the fada directly with Option and the vowel.

Phones: on an iPhone or Android, press and hold a vowel and slide to the letter with the fada. Gboard and SwiftKey also offer an Irish (Gaeilge) keyboard with Irish word suggestions. Linux has an Irish layout where AltGr plus a vowel types the fada. In HTML write á, é, í, ó, ú (capital: Á and so on) and ⁊ for ⁊. Irish punctuation follows English: “ ” and ‘ ’ quotes, and the apostrophe of m’athair (my father) and b’fhéidir (maybe).

Gaelic type: the dotted letters ḃ ċ ḋ ḟ ġ ṁ ṗ ṡ ṫ and the sign ⁊

Until the middle of the 20th century Irish was usually printed and taught in Gaelic type (cló Gaelach), a typeface descended from the insular hand of medieval Irish scribes. In it, lenition was shown not by an added h but by a dot over the consonant, the ponc séimhithe: ḃ ċ ḋ ḟ ġ ṁ ṗ ṡ ṫ stand for today’s bh ch dh fh gh mh ph sh th, so mo ṁáṫair is the old way of writing mo mháthair. Spelling standardisation and the move to Roman type were separate: simplified spelling was introduced in 1945, grammar rules were revised in 1953, and gradual Roman type in school texts and examination papers was announced in 1963.

The Gaelic letter shapes themselves are a matter of font, not separate characters; the dotted letters, though, are real characters (Ḃ U+1E02, Ċ U+010A, Ġ U+0120, Ṡ U+1E60 and so on), shared partly with Maltese. You still see them on headstones, shopfronts, pub signs and designs that want an older Irish look.

⁊ (U+204A, the Tironian et) is a medieval scribes’ shorthand for “and”, read agus in Irish. It survives on older signs and in the abbreviation ⁊rl. for agus araile (etc.). Unicode also has insular letters such as ꝺ ꝼ ᵹ for scholars transcribing manuscripts, but ordinary Irish text, even in Gaelic type, does not need them.

Ogham, the oldest Irish alphabet ᚛ᚁᚂᚃᚄᚅ᚜

Before Irish was written in Latin letters it was cut in Ogham (Ogham, also spelt ogam): groups of strokes and notches along the edge of a stone, read upward from the bottom. Around 400 Ogham inscriptions are known, mostly memorial stones from roughly the 4th to the 6th century, the oldest written form of Irish. Most stand in southern Ireland, above all in County Kerry, with others in Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man.

The 20 main letters come in four groups of five called aicmí: B L F S N, H D T C Q, M G NG Z R and A O U E I, with extra letters (forfeda) added later. Medieval scholars gave the letters names, many of them trees: beith (birch) ᚁ, fearn (alder) ᚃ, sail (willow) ᚄ, dair (oak) ᚇ, coll (hazel) ᚉ.

Unicode has had Ogham since version 3.0 (1999): 26 letters, the feather marks ᚛ and ᚜ that open and close a text, and the Ogham space mark U+1680, shown on the stemline by fonts that use one. Writing a name in Ogham means spelling it the Irish way, without fadas, so Éire becomes ᚛ᚓᚔᚏᚓ᚜. Not every font includes Ogham, so check how it shows before a print or a tattoo.

Where Irish is spoken, and its Celtic cousins

CLDR estimates about 1.3 million speakers of Irish: around 1.2 million in Ireland 🇮🇪 and about 100,000 in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧, mainly Northern Ireland. Ireland’s 2022 census counted far more people with some Irish, close to 1.9 million, and about 72,000 who speak it daily outside school. It is the national and first official language of Ireland under the Constitution, an official language of the European Union since 2007 (a full working one since 2022), and it gained official recognition in Northern Ireland in 2022.

Irish is the everyday community language in the Gaeltacht, areas of Donegal, Mayo, Galway (Connemara and the Aran Islands), Kerry, Cork, Waterford and Meath, where many teenagers spend summers at Irish college. Prices are in euros in Ireland (€5) and in pounds sterling in Northern Ireland (£5).

Irish is a Goidelic Celtic language. Its nearest relatives are Scottish Gaelic and Manx, which grew out of the same medieval Gaelic. Welsh and Breton are more distant Brythonic cousins, and our Welsh and Breton letter pages sit alongside this one, as do the Ireland emoji collection ☘️ 🇮🇪 and the English letters page.