Zhuang Alphabet

Zhuang is Vahcuengh in its own spelling, the Zhuang people are Bouxcuengh, and writing in Zhuang is Sawcuengh. Standard Zhuang is based on the speech of Wuming, just north of Nanning in Guangxi, and is written in the Latin alphabet. The alphabet was first published in 1957 with several special letters; the 1982 revision replaced every one of them with ordinary letters, so modern Zhuang needs only the 26 letters of an English keyboard.

Some letters do jobs an English reader would not expect. w is a vowel, an unrounded u made with the lips spread; c is a soft sh-like sound, as in Cuengh; in the standard Wuming pronunciation s is close to the th of English thin and r is a soft throaty gh. Two-letter spellings write single sounds: ng and ny are nasals, mb and nd are b and d made with the air drawn inwards, gv is a k with rounded lips and gy a k followed by a y-glide. Among the vowels, ae and oe are written as two letters but stand for one vowel each.

Zhuang has no accented letters and no extra punctuation, so nothing on this page is needed for everyday Zhuang beyond the plain letters; what makes the spelling work is the last letter of each syllable.

Zhuang tones and the tone letters z, j, x, q, h

Zhuang is a tone language: the pitch of a syllable can be the only difference between two words. Standard Zhuang counts six tones on syllables that end in a vowel or a nasal, and writes them with a letter at the end of the syllable that is not pronounced. Tone 1 has no letter; then z is tone 2, j tone 3, x tone 4, q tone 5 and h tone 6.

That is why so many Zhuang words end in a consonant cluster that looks impossible: Cuengh is the syllable cueng with tone 6, Namzningz, Nanning, has tone 2 on both syllables, and Gvangjsae, Guangxi, is gvang with tone 3 followed by sae with tone 1. The greeting Mwngz ndei is mwng with tone 2 and ndei with tone 1.

Syllables that end in a stop work differently: there the final letter itself shows the tone, with p, t, k marking tone 3 with a short vowel or tone 5 with a long vowel (tone 7), and b, d, g marking tone 6 (tone 8). So a final consonant in Zhuang is either a real sound or a tone mark, and readers learn to tell them apart quickly, since z, j, x and q never stand for a sound at the end of a syllable.

The 1957 Zhuang alphabet: Ƨ З Ч Ƽ Ƅ and ƃ ƌ ŋ ə ɵ ɯ

The first official Zhuang alphabet, adopted in 1957, wrote the tones with letters shaped like numbers: ƨ for tone 2, з for tone 3, ч for tone 4, ƽ for tone 5 and ƅ for tone 6, each recalling the digit of its tone. It also had special letters for sounds now spelled with two letters: ƃ and ƌ (today mb and nd), ŋ (ng), ə (ae), ɵ (oe) and ɯ (w).

Because those letters were hard to print and type, the 1982 revision swapped them all for plain letters, and the five tone letters became z, j, x, q and h. Unicode still encodes the 1957 tone letters as their own characters, Ƨ ƨ Latin letter tone two, Ƽ ƽ tone five and Ƅ ƅ tone six, and they exist in Unicode because of Zhuang. Tones 3 and 4 have no Latin letters of their own: texts use the Cyrillic З з and Ч ч, which look the same. If you are copying an old Zhuang text, take those two from this page, not a digit 3 or 4.

Sawndip, the Old Zhuang characters

Long before the Latin alphabet, Zhuang was written in Sawndip, "raw" or "unripe" characters: square characters built from the parts of Chinese characters, some borrowed for their sound, some for their meaning, and many newly made by combining a sound part with a meaning part. Sawndip was never standardised; it was used by singers to write down folk songs, by ritual specialists for their texts, and in local records, and the same word could be written differently from one valley to the next.

Sawndip is typed with the CJK characters of Unicode, and rarer characters need a font with wide CJK coverage. This page keeps to the Latin alphabet, which is what Zhuang schools, newspapers and official signs use today.

How to type Zhuang letters and copy and paste them

Standard Zhuang needs no special keyboard: type it on any computer or phone, and turn off autocorrect, which tries to change words like mwngz and ndei. The only special characters are those of the 1957 alphabet, and the simplest way to get them is to copy them from the grid above.

In a web page they can be written as codes: Ƨ Ƨ and ƨ ƨ, Ƽ Ƽ and ƽ ƽ, Ƅ Ƅ and ƅ ƅ, with Cyrillic з з and ч ч. For prices in yuan, the sign ¥ is ¥ in HTML, Alt+0165 on Windows and Option+Y on a US Mac keyboard; Chinese text often uses the full-width ￥ or the character 元 after the number.

Where Zhuang is spoken

Zhuang is spoken in southern China, above all in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Gvangjsae, and in the Wenshan Zhuang and Miao Autonomous Prefecture of Yunnan, with smaller communities in Guangdong and Guizhou. CLDR, Unicode's locale data, estimates about 4.4 million speakers who use the language; the Zhuang people are far more numerous, close to 20 million in China's 2020 census, the country's largest ethnic minority, and many speak one of the Zhuang varieties at home while reading and writing mostly in Chinese.

Zhuang belongs to the Tai–Kadai family. The northern varieties, on which Standard Zhuang is based, are close to Bouyei in Guizhou, and the southern ones to Tày and Nùng across the border in Vietnam; Thai and Lao are more distant cousins, with many shared basic words. See the China and Chinese collections for the country and its national language, and the Thai, Lao and Vietnamese collections for the neighbours.