Latvian Alphabet & Special Letters

Latvian is written in the Latin alphabet with 33 letters: A Ā B C Č D E Ē F G Ģ H I Ī J K Ķ L Ļ M N Ņ O P R S Š T U Ū V Z Ž. Eleven of them carry a mark, and each marked letter stands right after its plain partner. There is no Q, W, X or Y: foreign names are respelled the Latvian way and given a Latvian ending, so John Lennon becomes Džons Lenons and Shakespeare Šekspīrs.

The marks come in three kinds. The macron, in Latvian garumzīme (length mark), sits on the vowels ā ē ī ū. The caron makes č š ž. A small comma under ģ ķ ļ ņ (over the small ģ) marks the soft, palatal consonants. Spelling is close to phonetic: once you know these eleven letters, you can read Latvian aloud fairly accurately.

Dictionaries treat the caron and comma letters as letters of their own, after their base letter, while the macron vowels are generally sorted together with the plain ones.

Ā, Ē, Ī, Ū: the macron marks a long vowel

A line over a vowel means it is held longer, and length changes the word. kazas are goats but kāzas is a wedding; pile is a drop and pīle a duck; lapa is a leaf and lāpa a torch. The macron is written whether or not the syllable is stressed, so it appears all over ordinary words: paldies (thank you) has none, but lūdzu (please), labrīt (good morning), mīlu (I love) and Rīga all do.

Two vowel sounds are not shown in writing. E and ē each stand for both a closed e and an open sound close to the vowel of English cat. O in native words is usually the diphthong uo, as in ozols (oak), and a plain o mainly in loanwords such as opera. Stress, which the alphabet does not mark either, falls almost always on the first syllable.

Č, Š, Ž and Ģ, Ķ, Ļ, Ņ: the soft consonants

Č č is the ch of church, Š š the sh of ship, Ž ž the sound in measure: čau (hi), šodien (today), žurnāls (magazine). Latvian also writes dz and dž for the voiced partners of c and č, as in dziesma (song) and Džons, but those pairs are not counted as separate letters.

Ģ ģ and Ķ ķ are soft g and k, made with the tongue on the hard palate, somewhere between g or k and a d or t followed by y: ģimene (family), ķirsis (cherry). Ļ ļ is the soft l of Italian gli, and Ņ ņ the ñ of Spanish año: ļoti (very), ņemt (to take). Unicode names these letters 'with cedilla', but in Latvian they are drawn with a small comma below, and the small ģ, which has no room below, takes a turned comma above. Fonts that show a hooked cedilla under them look wrong to Latvian readers.

How to type Latvian characters on a keyboard and phone

On Windows, add the Latvian (Standard) keyboard, where AltGr plus the base letter types the special letter: AltGr+A ā, AltGr+C č, AltGr+G ģ, AltGr+N ņ, AltGr+S š and so on. Many people in Latvia prefer the Latvian (QWERTY) layout, known as the apostrophe keyboard: press ' and then the letter (' a gives ā, ' s gives š), and ' then the space bar for a real apostrophe. Without a Latvian layout, Alt codes work only for the few characters in the old Windows character set: Alt+0138 Š, Alt+0154 š, Alt+0142 Ž, Alt+0158 ž, plus Alt+0132 „, Alt+0148 ”, Alt+0171 «, Alt+0187 » and Alt+0128 €. In Word, type the code and press Alt+X: 0101 ā, 010D č, 0113 ē, 0123 ģ, 012B ī, 0137 ķ, 013C ļ, 0146 ņ, 0161 š, 016B ū, 017E ž.

On a Mac, add the Latvian input source in System Settings › Keyboard › Input Sources. On the ordinary US layout, holding a key down opens a menu that offers ā č ē ī š ū ž, and the ABC – Extended layout types a macron with Option+A followed by the vowel and a caron with Option+V followed by c, s or z. For ģ ķ ļ ņ use the Latvian input source or copy them from the grid above. On iPhone and Android, add the Latvian keyboard and hold a letter (a, c, g, k, l, n …) to get its Latvian form. In HTML, the named entities ā č &gcedil; ņ š ž and their kin work in all modern browsers.

Latvian quotation marks, prices and where Latvian is spoken

Latvian quotations open with the low mark and close high: „Laipni lūdzam!” (welcome). The closing mark is printed both as ” and as “, and the angle quotes «…» are common too. Numbers take a decimal comma and a space between thousands, 1 234,50, and the euro sign follows the amount: 12,50 €. Latvia adopted the euro on 1 January 2014, replacing the lats (Ls).

CLDR estimates about 1.1 million speakers of Latvian in Latvia, where it is the only official language; it has also been an official language of the European Union since 2004, and there are Latvian communities in Ireland, the UK, the US and elsewhere. Latvian is one of the two living Baltic languages; the other is Lithuanian, which shares č š ž but has its own ą ę ė į ų (see the Lithuanian collection). Many people in Latvia also speak Russian, written in Cyrillic (see the Russian collection), and the Latvia collection gathers the flag 🇱🇻 and the emoji people send for the country, from Jāņi to hockey.

Where the Latvian marks came from

For centuries Latvian was printed in Gothic letters with a German-style spelling, such as sch for the sound of š. The modern spelling with macrons, carons and the comma letters was worked out by a commission around the linguists Jānis Endzelīns and Kārlis Mīlenbahs in 1908 and became the standard in independent Latvia after 1918.

The 1946 spelling reform in Soviet Latvia removed ŗ and ō from the alphabet; the digraph ch was dropped in 1957. The alphabet now has 33 letters. Latvian émigré publishers kept writing ŗ for decades, so you still meet it in older books printed abroad, and written Latgalian, the regional language of eastern Latvia, uses ō and y today. They are not part of standard Latvian and are left out of the grid.