Tai Le Script (Tai Nüa)

Tai Nüa (also spelled Tai Nuea, and called Dehong Dai in Chinese) is a Tai language of the Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture in western Yunnan, around the towns of Mangshi and Ruili on the border with Myanmar. The name means roughly 'Upper' or 'Northern Tai'; the word nüa is the same one that means north in Thai and Lao. CLDR estimates about 270,000 speakers in China, and related Tai communities live across the border in Myanmar's Shan State.

The language has its own alphabet, called Tai Le in Unicode, or the Dehong Dai script. Like Thai, Lao, Shan and Burmese it belongs to the large family of scripts that descend from the Brahmi script of ancient India, and it grew out of the older Tai writing of the Shan region. In China the script was reformed in the 1950s, and that reformed alphabet, with later revisions, is what schools, signs and printed books in Dehong use today. Street signs in Dehong towns such as Mangshi and Ruili often carry Chinese characters and Tai Le together.

How Tai Le works: consonants, vowel letters and tone letters

What sets Tai Le apart from its relatives is how plain its writing is. In Thai or Burmese a vowel sign may sit above, below or even in front of its consonant; in reformed Tai Le vowel characters follow the initial consonant on the same line, and a vowel-initial syllable starts with the carrier ᥟ qa. There are no stacked letters, no conjuncts and no combining marks in the Unicode block, so the letters are typed in exactly the order they are read and every one of them stands by itself on the screen.

The 19 initial consonants are ᥐ ka, ᥑ xa, ᥒ nga, ᥓ tsa, ᥔ sa, ᥕ ya, ᥖ ta, ᥗ tha, ᥘ la, ᥙ pa, ᥚ pha, ᥛ ma, ᥜ fa, ᥝ va, ᥞ ha, ᥟ qa, ᥠ kha, ᥡ tsha and ᥢ na. ᥟ qa writes the glottal stop, the catch in the throat that begins a syllable which sounds as if it starts with a vowel. The 10 vowel letters are ᥣ a, ᥤ i, ᥥ ee, ᥦ eh, ᥧ u, ᥨ oo, ᥩ o, ᥪ ue, ᥫ e and ᥬ aue. In Dehong, ᥭ is used as a final consonant (its Unicode name is TAI LE LETTER AI), so the syllable tai is spelled ᥖ ta followed by final ᥭ: ᥖᥭ.

Tai Nüa is a tonal language with six tones, and the same consonant and vowel can mean quite different things on a different pitch. The first tone is left unmarked; the other five are written with the tone letters ᥰ ᥱ ᥲ ᥳ ᥴ (tone 2 to tone 6), which follow the entire syllable. Some older printed material marks tones instead with small accents above the syllable, which Unicode writes with the ordinary combining accents. The block has no digits or punctuation of its own; texts borrow them.

Tai Le font copy and paste: the letters in fancy usernames

Many people meet these letters without knowing they belong to a language at all. 'Tai Le font' generators and aesthetic-text sites pick the Tai Le letters that happen to look like Latin ones: ᥲ (tone 4) for a, ᥴ (tone 6) for c, ᥱ (tone 3) for e, ᥣ (the vowel a) for l, ᥒ (nga) for n, ᥙ (pa) for u, ᥕ (ya) for w and ᥡ (tsha) for y, usually mixed with look-alikes from other scripts such as the Limbu digits ᥆ for o and ᥎ for v. That is how a name like ᥣ᥆᥎ᥱ ends up in a bio.

There is nothing wrong with borrowing a shape, but it helps to know what it is. To a Tai Nüa reader ᥴᥙtᥱ is not 'cute' but a jumble of a tone mark, a consonant and another tone mark, and screen readers may read these characters out by their Tai Le names or skip them, so a fancy username can be unreadable to blind users. Some phones and apps also have no Tai Le font and show the letters as boxes. If you are writing actual Tai Nüa, the symbol grid above has every letter of the alphabet.

How to type Tai Le letters

The quickest way is to copy them from this page: tap a letter in the grid, and paste it before copying the next letter. Every character is standard Unicode from the Tai Le block, U+1950 to U+197F, which was added in Unicode 4.0 in 2003.

Windows includes a Tai Le keyboard layout, which can be added in the keyboard settings, and the font Microsoft Tai Le, so the script displays without extra downloads. On other systems install a font such as Noto Sans Tai Le if the letters show as empty boxes. In HTML you can write any letter by its code point, for example ᥐ for ᥐ ka and ᥴ for the tone-6 letter ᥴ.

Related Tai scripts and languages

Tai Nüa is one of a family of Tai languages spread from southern China to Thailand, and related languages use several scripts. A related neighbour is Tai Lue in Xishuangbanna, further south in Yunnan, written in New Tai Lue (ᦂ ᦅ), which looks quite different. Shan in Myanmar uses a form of the Burmese alphabet, Northern Thai has the Lanna letters, and Tai Dam in Vietnam writes with the Tai Viet script; Thai and Lao have their own alphabets. Each of these has a collection page of its own, as does China for the flag and the yuan.