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Latvian alphabet


Latvian orthography, historically, has used a system based upon German phonetic principles and the Latgalian dialect was written using Polish orthographic principles. The present-day Latvian orthography has been in use since 1908. Its basis is the Latin alphabet. For the most part it is phonetic in that it follows the language's pronunciation.

Today, the Latvian standard alphabet consists of 33 letters.

The modern standard Latvian alphabet uses 22 unmodified letters of the Latin alphabet. The Latvian alphabet lacks Q, W, X and Y. It adds a further eleven letters by adding diacritic marks to some letters. The vowel letters A, E, I and U can take a macron to show length, unmodified letters being short. The letters C, S and Z, that in unmodified form are pronounced [ts], [s] and [z] respectively, can be marked with a caron. These marked letters, Č, Š and Ž are pronounced [], [ʃ] and [ʒ] respectively. The letters Ģ, Ķ, Ļ and Ņ are written with a cedilla or a small comma placed below (or above the lowercase g). They are modified (palatalized) versions of G, K, L and N and represent the sounds [ɟ], [c], [ʎ] and [ɲ]. Non-standard varieties of Latvian add extra letters to this standard set.


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