Tai Dam Alphabet & Script

Tai Dam (Black Tai, Thái Đen in Vietnamese) writes with its own script, which Unicode calls Tai Viet and Vietnamese calls chữ Thái. It belongs to the same family of Tai alphabets as Thai and Lao, and like them it is built around consonants, with vowel signs added around each one.

Tai Dam's 42 basic consonant letters form 21 low/high pairs. ꪀ is low ko and ꪁ high ko, ꪢ low mo and ꪣ high mo, ꪙ high no and ꪘ low no. Within each pair, the consonant is the same; the letter series helps show the syllable's tone. The full Tai Viet block also includes three pairs used only for Tai Dón: low/high kho, cho and pho. The grid shows the paired letters low on the left and high on the right, from ꪀ ko to the glottal pair ꪮ ꪯ o that carries syllables beginning with a vowel.

Tai Dam is a tonal language with six tones, and the pairs do much of the work of showing them: the low or high letter gives the series, the tone mark (or its absence) the tone inside it.

Tai Dam vowels and tone marks ꪵ ꪱ ꪿ ꫁

Vowel signs go all around the consonant. ꪱ aa, ꪺ ua and ꪽ an follow it; ꪲ i, ꪳ ue, ꪸ ia and ꪾ am sit above, ꪴ u below; ꪰ mai kang and ꪷ mai khit are two further marks written above the letter. Five vowels, ꪵ e, ꪶ o, ꪹ uea, ꪻ aue and ꪼ ay, are written before the consonant they follow in speech: ke is ꪵꪀ, and the name Tai begins with ꪼ.

Unicode stores those five in the order they are written, not the order they are spoken, the same way Thai and Lao do. So you type ꪵ first and then ꪀ, as you would write it; copying preserves the character order, but correct display depends on the app's font support.

The tone marks ꪿ mai ek and ꫁ mai tho sit above the consonant: ꪀ꪿ꪱ, ꪀ꫁ꪱ. Older manuscripts often leave tones unmarked, and readers knew the word from the letter pair and the context. Unicode also has two spacing tone signs, ꫀ mai nueng and ꫂ mai song, which stand beside the syllable instead of above it.

Tai Viet symbols and punctuation ꫛ ꫞ ꫟

Besides letters, the Tai Viet block has five signs of its own: the symbols ꫛ kon, ꫜ nueng and ꫝ sam, and the text marks ꫞ ho hoi and ꫟ koi koi, found in traditional writing. Everyday Tai Dam text separates words and phrases with spaces and uses the ordinary digits 1 2 3 and the marks . , ? ! from Latin script; the script has no digits of its own.

The whole script, 72 characters from U+AA80 to U+AADF, was added in Unicode 5.2 in 2009, after work with Tai Dam communities in Vietnam and abroad.

How to type Tai Dam: keyboard and font

Tai Dam is not among the usual keyboards of phones and computers, so the simplest way is to copy from this page: click or tap a letter, then paste. To type longer text, install a Tai Viet keyboard layout for Keyman, which runs on Windows, Mac, Android and iPhone, and type letters in written order, a before-vowel first.

If Tai Dam shows up as empty boxes, the device lacks a font for the script. Tai Heritage Pro, a free font from SIL, and Noto Sans Tai Viet from Google both cover it. The marks above and below need a font that handles them; with a missing font they float off their letter. In HTML, write a character by its number, e.g. ꪀ for ꪀ.

Where Tai Dam is spoken

CLDR estimates around 730,000 Tai Dam speakers, all counted in Vietnam 🇻🇳, in the mountain valleys of the northwest: Sơn La, Điện Biên and Lai Châu, around towns such as Điện Biên Phủ, the old Tai Dam Muang Thanh. The Tai Dam are part of the Thái, one of Vietnam's largest ethnic minorities, together with the White Tai (Tai Dón), who use the same script. The name Black Tai is usually explained by the dark indigo clothes of the women.

Many Tai Dam moved to Laos in the 1950s, and after 1975 many of them came to the United States and France as refugees. Iowa took in a large group under Governor Robert Ray, and Des Moines still has a Tai Dam community with its own festival. In central Thailand, the Thai Song Dam of Phetchaburi descend from Tai Dam brought there long ago.

Tai Dam's close relatives are the other Tai languages: see the Thai and Lao collections for their alphabets, the Vietnamese collection for đ and the Vietnamese tone marks, and the Vietnam collection for the flag 🇻🇳, the đồng sign ₫ and Vietnamese emoji.