The Lao alphabet is used mainly to write the Lao language. An abugida or alphasyllabary is a writing system composed of signs (graphemes) denoting consonants with an inherent following vowel, which are consistently modified to indicate other vowels (or, in some cases, the lack of a vowel). ... Lao (ພາສາລາວ phaasaa laao) also Laotian, is the official language of Laos. ... Unicode’s Universal Character Set potentially supports over 1 million code points (1,114,112 = 220 + 216 or 17 × 216, hexadecimal 110000) code points. ... ISO 15924, Codes for the representation of names of scripts, defines two sets of codes for a number of writing systems (scripts). ... Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning sound, voice) is the study of the sounds of human speech. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... Lao (ພາສາລາວ phaasaa laao) also Laotian, is the official language of Laos. ...

The minority languages of Laos are also written in the Lao alphabet, and officially it is the only alphabet to write them in Laos, but many speakers of Hmong prefer the latin alphabet. |familycolor=Hmong-Mien |states=Sichuan, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and USA. |speakers=over 4 million[1] |fam1=Hmong-Mien |iso2=hmn| |lc1=hmn|ld1=Hmong (generic)|ll1=none |lc2=mww|ld2=Hmong Daw (Laos, China)|ll2=none |lc3=hmv|ld3=Hmong Do (Vietnam)|ll3=none |lc4=hmf|ld4=Hmong Don (Vietnam... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ...

The Lao alphabet is very similar to the Thai alphabet, but Lao's spelling system is simpler and more phonetic, partially due to a spelling reform carried out in the 1960s.

Consonants

The table below shows the Lao consonant letters with their phonetic value in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and transcriptions according to the US Board on Geographic Names and the British Permanent Committee on Geographical Names (BGN/PCGN), the US Library of Congress (ALA/LC) and the transcriptions used in the Unicode names of the letters. Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... The Library of Congress is the de facto national library of the United States and the research arm of the United States Congress. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ...

Vowel nuclei

The table below shows the Lao vowel nuclei, combined with the consonant ກ. (provisional version)

* indicates variations no longer used in the reformed spelling

Lao in Unicode

The Unicode range for Lao is U+0E80 ... U+0EFF. Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ...

External links

• Omniglot - Lao alphabet
• The Lao Alphabet at SEAsite
• Laos - language situation by N. J. Enfield
• Virtual Lao Keyboard
• The Unicode Standard 5.0 Code ChartsPDF (87.8 KiB) Lao Range: 0E80 - 0EFF, from the Unicode Consortium

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for desktop publishing use. ... A kibibyte (a contraction of kilo binary byte) is a unit of information or computer storage, commonly abbreviated KiB (never kiB). 1 kibibyte = 210 bytes = 1,024 bytes The kibibyte is closely related to the kilobyte, which can be used either as a synonym for kibibyte or to refer to...

See also

• Brahmic family