Luo Alphabet

Dholuo (dho means mouth, and so language: the mouth of the Luo) is written in the Latin alphabet. As it is usually taught, the alphabet runs a b ch d dh e f g h i j k l m n ng ng' ny o p r s t th u w y. The single letters are those of English minus q, x and z; Unicode's CLDR data lists them as a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p r s t u v w y. C hardly ever stands alone, because it lives inside ch, and v turns up mainly in borrowed words.

Six of the letters are pairs that count as one sound each: ch, dh, ng, ng', ny and th. None of them needs an accent or a special character, which is why a Luo text can be typed on any keyboard. The one mark that does matter is the apostrophe in ng', which turns one sound into another.

Dholuo has no accented letters at all. The language is tonal and has two sets of vowels in harmony with each other, but the standard spelling marks neither: five vowel letters a e i o u stand for all of them, and readers tell words apart from context.

Ng', ng, ny, dh and th: what the letter pairs do

Ng' with an apostrophe is the sound at the end of English sing, said on its own, and in Dholuo it can start a word: ng'ato (someone), ang'wen (four), and it closes names like Ochieng' and Achieng'. Ng without the apostrophe is the ng of English finger, with a g you can hear, as in ngima (life). Leaving the apostrophe out therefore writes a different sound, which is why it appears in names such as Lupita Nyong'o even in English newspapers.

Ny is the ny of canyon, the same sound as Spanish ñ, as in Nyasaye (God) and nyar (daughter of). Ch is close to the ch of church and j to the j of jam. Dh and th are made with the tongue against the teeth: dh like the th of this, as in Dholuo itself, and th like the th of thin.

How to type ng' on a keyboard, iPhone or Android

Every keyboard has the apostrophe, so ng' needs no special input method: type n, g and the ' key next to Enter on a computer, or the ' on the punctuation layer of a phone keyboard. The straight apostrophe is U+0027 ('); typographers and word processors use the curly right single quotation mark U+2019 (’) for the same job, and both forms are seen in Dholuo text.

Phones and Word often turn ' into ’ automatically. That is fine for reading, but a search for Nyong'o with one form may miss text written with the other. If you need the straight form on an iPhone, switch off Smart Punctuation in Settings → General → Keyboard; in Word, undo the autocorrection with Ctrl+Z right after typing it. In HTML, write ' for ' and ’ for ’.

In linguistics books the same sound is sometimes written with the IPA letter ŋ, which is how the related Acholi language writes it in everyday spelling. In Dholuo the everyday spelling is ng'.

Where the Luo language is spoken

Dholuo is the language of the Luo (Joluo) of western Kenya, around the Winam Gulf of Lake Victoria, which the Luo call Nam Lolwe: Kisumu, Siaya, Homa Bay and Migori counties. Across the border it is spoken in Tanzania's Mara Region, around Rorya and Tarime. Unicode's CLDR estimates about 5.7 million speakers in Kenya. Many Luo speakers also use Kiswahili and English; Kiswahili is Kenya's national language, and both are official languages.

Dholuo belongs to the Luo branch of the Western Nilotic languages. Its relatives in Uganda include Acholi, Lango, Alur and Dhopadhola, and in South Sudan Shilluk; Acholi writes the ng' sound as ŋ, so Dholuo ng'eyo (to know) is ŋeyo there. Its Kenyan neighbours, Luyia, Gusii and Kalenjin, belong to other branches. The Acholi, Lango, Swahili, Luyia, Gusii and Kalenjin collections cover those languages, and the Kenya and Tanzania collections have the country emoji.