Lisu Alphabet

Lisu is written in the Fraser alphabet, created by Sara Ba Thaw, a Karen evangelist from Myanmar, between 1908 and 1914, then revised by James O. Fraser, a British missionary of the China Inland Mission, and Lisu pastors, for the Lisu villages of the Yunnan–Burma border. They built it from Latin capital letters, using some the right way up and turning others upside down or back to front, so that each sound got a shape of its own: ꓕ is a T standing on its head, ꓤ an upturned R, ꓯ an upside-down A, ꓷ a D facing left and ꓛ a reversed C.

There is only one case. The Lisu alphabet has no lowercase and never had one: every letter is written in its capital-like form, at the start of a sentence and in the middle of a word alike, which is why ꓡꓲ-ꓢꓴ, Lisu, looks like LI-SU typed with Caps Lock on.

The script spread through mission schools and the Lisu Bible, whose New Testament was printed in the 1930s. In the 1950s China introduced a new Latin-based Lisu alphabet, but the Fraser script stayed in daily use in churches, letters and songbooks, and by 1992 it had been approved in China as one of two official Lisu scripts. It is not the only Lisu writing system: in the 1920s Wang Renbo, a Lisu religious leader in Weixi, created a syllabary of his own, the "bamboo script", which few people ever learnt and which is not in Unicode.

How to read the Lisu alphabet: consonants, vowels and tone letters

The 30 consonants each carry the vowel a, which is why Unicode names them LISU LETTER BA, PA, PHA and so on: on its own ꓟ reads ma, and a vowel letter written after a consonant replaces the a, so ꓡꓲ is li and ꓢꓴ is su. The first fifteen come in sets of three, voiced, plain and aspirated: ꓐ ꓑ ꓒ ba, pa, pha; ꓓ ꓔ ꓕ da, ta, tha; ꓖ ꓗ ꓘ ga, ka, kha; ꓙ ꓚ ꓛ ja, ca, cha; ꓜ ꓝ ꓞ dza, tsa, tsha. The grid above keeps those sets in rows, so a column reads down all the voiced, all the plain or all the breathy sounds.

The 10 vowels are ꓮ a, ꓯ ae, ꓰ e, ꓱ eu, ꓲ i, ꓳ o, ꓴ u, ꓵ ue, ꓶ uh and ꓷ oe. A vowel letter at the start of a syllable stands on its own, with no consonant before it.

Lisu is a tonal language, and the Fraser alphabet writes pitch with six tone letters placed after the syllable: ꓸ mya ti, ꓹ na po, ꓺ mya cya, ꓻ mya bo, ꓼ mya na and ꓽ mya jeu. They look like a full stop, a comma, two dots, a dot and a comma, a semicolon and a colon, but they are letters: Unicode classes them as modifier letters, part of the word, so a line break or a spell checker should never separate them from the syllable they mark. The Latin full stop and colon are different characters and do not do this job.

U+11FB0 𑾰 yha was added in Unicode 13.0 (2020) for writing Naxi; despite its Unicode name, it is not part of the standard Lisu alphabet.

Lisu punctuation, numbers and money

Lisu has a comma and a full stop of its own: ꓾, the Lisu comma, and ꓿, the Lisu full stop, which looks like an equals sign. Because the dot and the comma shapes are already taken by the tone letters, the Fraser script needed different marks for the ends of phrases and sentences. Syllables of a name or compound are joined with an ordinary hyphen, as in ꓡꓲ-ꓢꓴ.

There are no Lisu digits; numbers are written with ordinary 1 2 3. Money depends on the country: in China the yuan, written ¥ or with the character 元; in Thailand the baht, ฿; in Myanmar the kyat, which has no Unicode sign and is written K or Ks.

How to type Lisu letters, and which fonts show them

The quickest way is to copy from the grid above or from ꓡꓲ-ꓢꓴ in the text and paste it. Windows includes two Lisu keyboard layouts, Lisu (Basic) and Lisu (Standard), which can be added under language settings; on phones, Lisu keyboard apps and Keyman provide layouts for Android and iOS.

If you see empty boxes instead of ꓡꓲ-ꓢꓴ, the device has no Lisu font. The free Noto Sans Lisu from Google and Lisu Bosa from SIL International cover the whole alphabet.

All of this is ordinary Unicode text. The Lisu block, U+A4D0 to U+A4FF, arrived in Unicode 5.2 in 2009 with 48 characters; 𑾰 yha, added in 2020, lives at U+11FB0. In HTML a letter can be written by its number, for example ꓡ for ꓡ. One warning: because the letters copy Latin capitals, ꓮ, ꓐ and ꓚ look exactly like A, B and C but are different characters. A search for "LISU" typed in Latin letters will not find ꓡꓲ-ꓢꓴ, and Unicode lists the Lisu letters among the look-alikes that browsers and security tools watch for in faked web addresses.

Where the Lisu language is spoken

Lisu is spoken in mountainous areas of China, Myanmar, Thailand and India. Its heartland is the Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture in northwest Yunnan, along the deep gorge of the Nu (Salween) River 🇨🇳; CLDR estimates about 640,000 speakers in China. Lisu communities also live in Kachin and Shan States of Myanmar 🇲🇲, in hill villages of northern Thailand 🇹🇭 and in Arunachal Pradesh in India.

Lisu belongs to the Loloish branch of Tibeto-Burman, alongside Nuosu (Sichuan Yi), Lahu and Akha. See the Sichuan Yi collection for a related language written in a syllabary, the Burmese, Kachin and Thai collections for the languages of the neighbours Lisu communities live among, the Chinese collection for Chinese characters, and the China, Myanmar and Thailand collections for each country's flag and emoji.

The biggest Lisu holiday is Kuoshi, the Lisu New Year, with feasting, singing, dancing and contests with the crossbow, the Lisu hunter's traditional weapon and a symbol of the Nujiang Lisu. In some Lisu areas of Yunnan the Knife-Pole Festival brings men climbing a ladder whose rungs are sword blades, and walking over hot coals.