Symbols
78Click a symbol to copy it and open its page.
Letters made for Khmu
The two letters Unicode added to the Lao block for writing Khmu. Standard Lao does not use them.
Consonants of the Lao script
The 27 Lao consonants plus the ligatures ໜ and ໝ, lined up by sound. The column is the consonant class (mid, high or low), which together with the tone mark decides the tone of a Lao syllable.
Vowel signs
Lao vowels are signs written around the consonant, and the sign goes before, above, below or after it depending on the vowel; ຼ and ຽ stand under or after a consonant for l and ia.
Tone marks and other signs
Tone marks and ໌ sit above a consonant: paste the consonant first, then the mark.
Lao digits
Currency
Lao kip first, then the money of the other countries with Khmu communities.
Where Khmu is spoken
Upland farming
On the map
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What the Khmu alphabet is
Khmu, written Kmhmu' by many of its own speakers, is the language of the Khmu people of northern Laos. It is not related to Lao: Lao is a Tai language like Thai, while Khmu belongs to the Austroasiatic family, the same large family as Khmer and Vietnamese. Their own name, Kmhmu', also means a person, a human being; Lao calls them ຂະມຸ (Khamu).
Khmu has no script of its own and no single official spelling. In Laos it is usually written with the Lao script, which is taught in Lao schools; in Thailand people use Thai letters, and a Latin spelling is common in dictionaries, in church books and online, where the final apostrophe of Kmhmu' marks a glottal stop. This page collects the Lao-script version, because it is the one with characters of its own in Unicode.
ໞ and ໟ: the two Lao letters made for Khmu
Unicode 6.1 (2012) added two Khmu letters at the last assigned positions in the Lao block: U0EDE ໞ LAO LETTER KHMU GO and U0EDF ໟ LAO LETTER KHMU NYO; standard Lao does not use them. As the name says, khmu go writes a g sound; Lao itself has b (ບ) and d (ດ) but no g, so Khmu writers needed a letter for it. Khmu nyo represents final /ny/ in Khmu, a position ordinary Lao ຍ cannot fill.
Because they are specialised characters, many fonts and keyboards still lack them. If ໞ or ໟ shows up as an empty box, the font on that device does not cover them; the text itself is fine, and a font with full Lao coverage, such as Noto Sans Lao, displays it.
Lao script letters for writing Khmu
Everything else comes from Lao. The script has 27 consonants plus the ligatures ໜ (h n) and ໝ (h m), and each consonant belongs to a class, mid (ກ ຈ ດ ຕ ບ ປ ຢ ອ), high (ຂ ສ ຖ ຜ ຝ ຫ) or low (ຄ ງ ຊ ຍ ທ ນ ພ ຟ ມ ຣ ລ ວ ຮ); in Lao the consonant class and syllable type, together with any tone mark, determine the tone. Vowels are signs written around the consonant, before it (ເ ແ ໂ ໃ ໄ), above it (ິ ີ ຶ ື), below it (ຸ ູ) or after it (ະ າ), and ອ carries a vowel when a word starts with one.
Khmu words have their own shapes, and writers fit the script to them. Many Khmu words start with a short half-syllable or a cluster, as in Kmhmu' itself, and end in consonants that Lao words never end in, such as l, r, s and h. Writers spell these with combinations of Lao letters, and spellings still differ between books, teachers and villages. Khmu dialects also differ in sound: some have no tones, while the northern and western dialects have two tones, a well-studied example of tonogenesis.
How to type Khmu letters
Windows, macOS, Android and iPhone keyboards (Gboard among them) offer a Lao layout: add it in the language settings and switch with WinSpace on Windows or ControlSpace on a Mac. That layout covers the Lao consonants, vowels, tone marks and digits ໐ to ໙. The two Khmu letters ໞ and ໟ are not on the usual Lao layouts, so the simple way is to copy them from the grid above.
On a web page any character can be written by its number: ໞ gives ໞ and ໟ gives ໟ. Vowel signs above or below and the tone marks are combining characters: paste the consonant first and the sign right after it, so ກ followed by ີ makes ກີ.
Where Khmu is spoken
CLDR, Unicode's locale data, estimates about 460,000 Khmu speakers, all counted in Laos. The Khmu people are the country's largest group after the Lao, roughly one in ten people in Laos, living mostly in the northern provinces such as Luang Prabang, Oudomxay and Luang Namtha, where many families farm upland rice on the hill slopes. Smaller Khmu communities live in northern Thailand, in Vietnam, where the Khơ Mú are one of the officially recognised ethnic groups, and in Yunnan in China; families who came as refugees after 1975 live in the United States.
Almost every Khmu speaker in Laos also speaks Lao, so the Lao collection and the Laos collection ( ) are the natural next stops. The Thai and Vietnamese collections cover the other countries with Khmu communities, and the Khmer collection shows a distant Austroasiatic relative with a script of its own.
How to use them
5 situationsClick to copyKhmu Alphabet combos
12Worth knowing
- ໞ and ໟ sit at U0EDE and U0EDF, the last assigned positions in the Lao block. Apart from them, the only extra letters in the block are the ones for writing Pali and Sanskrit in Lao script.
- The names Khmu and Khmer look and sound alike, and the languages are distant relatives in the Austroasiatic family (Khmuic and Khmeric branches), but they are different languages of different peoples: Khmer is Cambodia's national language with its own script, Khmu is a minority language of northern Laos.
- Khmu dialects include toneless, two-tone and register varieties; linguists study how older consonant contrasts can develop into tone.
- In the Lao legend of the great gourd, from which the peoples of the land came out, the Khmu are often told as the first to emerge, the elder siblings of the Lao.
Questions people ask
6Does Khmu have its own alphabet?
No script of its own: in Laos it is written with the Lao script, in Thailand with Thai letters, and often with Latin letters. Unicode adds two Lao letters just for Khmu, ໞ khmu go and ໟ khmu nyo.
What is the difference between Khmu and Khmer?
They are distant relatives in the Austroasiatic family but different languages. Khmer is the national language of Cambodia, written in the Khmer script; Khmu is spoken mainly in northern Laos and written in Lao script.
How do you type ໞ and ໟ?
They are not on the usual Lao keyboard layouts, so copy them from this page. In HTML use ໞ for ໞ and ໟ for ໟ; on Windows you can also type 0EDE and press AltX in Word.
What language family is Khmu?
Austroasiatic, in its own Khmuic branch. It is not related to Lao, which is a Tai language, although almost all Khmu in Laos speak Lao as well.
How many people speak Khmu?
CLDR estimates about 460,000 speakers in Laos; the Khmu people make up roughly one in ten people in Laos, and smaller communities live in Thailand, Vietnam, China and the United States.
How do you pronounce Khmu?
In one syllable, close to kmu, though many speakers pronounce their own name Kmhmu' with a short half-syllable and a catch in the throat at the end. In Lao the name is ຂະມຸ, Khamu.
