Tai Lue Alphabet & Script

Tai Lue, also spelled Lü or Dai Lue, is the Tai language of Xishuangbanna in the far south of Yunnan, China. For centuries the Tai Lue wrote it in the Tham script, the same family of letters used for Northern Thai (Lanna), with consonants stacked under one another and Buddhist texts written on palm leaves. In the 1950s a simplified alphabet was made for schools and printing in China: Unicode calls it New Tai Lue, and in Chinese it is the new Dai script of Xishuangbanna.

The idea of the new script is that everything stands on one line. There are no stacked consonants and no letters hanging below the line: every vowel sign, final consonant and tone mark is a letter of its own beside the consonant. That makes New Tai Lue easy to print and type, and it is why the grid here can show the whole script as 83 separate characters.

Use of the old Tai Lue script was revived in 1987 and became widespread; after the Chinese government promoted New Tai Lue again in 1997, both scripts are used in China today.

Tai Lue consonants, vowels and tone marks ᦂ ᦅ ᦱ ᧈ

Like Thai, Lao and Tai Dam, Tai Lue sorts its consonants into a high and a low series. Each consonant sound has two letters: ᦂ high ka and ᦅ low ka, ᦖ high ma and ᦙ low ma, ᦜ high la and ᦟ low la. Within a pair they sound the same; the letter tells the reader which tone series the syllable belongs to. Twenty-two pairs make 44 consonant letters, shown in the grid high on the left and low on the right, from the glottal pair ᦀ ᦁ qa that carries syllables beginning with a vowel to ᦪ ᦫ sua.

The vowel signs follow the consonant on the same line: ᦱ aa, ᦲ ii, ᦳ u, ᦴ uu, ᦸ oa, ᦹ ue, and the diphthongs ᦻ aay, ᦼ uy, ᦽ oy, ᦾ oay, ᦿ uey, ᧀ iy. Four are written to the left of the consonant they follow in speech: ᦵ e, ᦶ ae, ᦷ o and ᦺ ay, the vowel at the start of the word Tai, ᦺᦑ. The sign ᦰ marks a short vowel.

Tai Lue has six tones in unchecked syllables and two in checked syllables. Two tone marks, ᧈ and ᧉ, are written at the end of unchecked syllables; together with the high or low consonant series, no mark or either mark distinguishes the six unchecked tones. So ᦂᦱ, ᦂᦱᧈ and ᦂᦱᧉ are three different syllables, and the same three with low ᦅ are three more.

Final consonants, digits and signs ᧂ ᧑ ᧞

A syllable can end in only a few sounds, and New Tai Lue gives each its own letter: ᧁ w, ᧂ ng, ᧃ n, ᧄ m, and the unreleased stops ᧅ k, ᧆ t and ᧇ p. ᦂᦱᧂ is kaang, ᦂᦱᧄ kaam.

The script has its own digits, ᧐ ᧑ ᧒ ᧓ ᧔ ᧕ ᧖ ᧗ ᧘ ᧙, used the same way as 0 to 9, and a second form of one, ᧚, taken from the older Tham digits. The two signs ᧞ lae and ᧟ laev are shorthand for common little words, a habit carried over from manuscripts. For everything else, spaces, commas and full stops are borrowed from ordinary text; the script has no punctuation of its own.

New Tai Lue reached Unicode in version 4.1 in 2005, in the block U+1980 to U+19DF.

How to type Tai Lue: font and keyboard

The quickest way is to copy from this page: click or tap a letter, then paste it. Windows ships a font, Microsoft New Tai Lue, and offers a New Tai Lue keyboard layout among its input languages; on phones and Macs a Tai Lue keyboard usually has to be added from a keyboard app, so copying is often easier.

If the letters show as empty boxes, the device has no font for the script. Besides Microsoft New Tai Lue, the free Noto Sans New Tai Lue from Google and Dai Banna SIL from SIL cover it. In HTML a character can be written by its number, e.g. ᦂ for ᦂ or ᦟ for ᦟ.

Where Tai Lue is spoken

CLDR estimates around 270,000 Tai Lue speakers in China 🇨🇳, in the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture on the Mekong, which the Chinese call the Lancang. Its old Tai name, Sipsong Panna, is usually explained as "twelve thousand rice fields", and its capital Jinghong is Chiang Rung in Tai Lue. In China the Tai Lue are counted as part of the Dai nationality, together with the Tai Nüa of Dehong.

Tai Lue villages also lie across the borders in northern Laos, the east of Shan State in Myanmar, northern Thailand and northwest Vietnam. There people mostly write with the Tham script or the national alphabet; New Tai Lue is used mainly in China.

Tai Lue's relatives have collections of their own: Northern Thai for the Lanna letters, Tai Nüa for the Tai Le script, which looks quite different, Shan, Thai, Lao and Tai Dam. The China collection has the flag 🇨🇳, the yuan sign ¥ and Chinese emoji.