Lao Alphabet Table
| Letter | Name says | Initial | Final | Tone class |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ກ | gai - chicken | /k/ | k | Middle |
| ຂ | kho sung - egg | /kh/ | - | High |
| ຄ | kho tam - water buffalo | /kh/ | - | Low |
| ງ | ngua / ngu - ox / snake | /ng/ | ng | Low |
| ຈ | chok - glass | /ch/ | - | Middle |
| ສ | seua - tiger | /s/ | - | High |
| ຊ | xang - elephant | /s/ | - | Low |
| ຍ | nyung - mosquito | /ny/ | i | Low |
| ດ | dek - child | /d/ | t | Middle |
| ຕ | taa - eye | /t/ | - | Middle |
| ຖ | thong - stocking, bag | /th/ | - | High |
| ທ | thung - flag | /th/ | - | Low |
| ນ | nok - bird | /n/ | n | Low |
| ບ | bae - goat | /b/ | p | Middle |
| ປ | paa - fish | /p/ | - | Middle |
| ຜ | pheng - bee | /ph/ | - | High |
| ຝ | fon - rain | /f/ | - | High |
| ພ | phuu - mountain | /ph/ | - | Low |
| ຟ | fai - fire | /f/ | - | Low |
| ມ | maew - cat | /m/ | m | Low |
| ຢ | yo - walking stick | /y/ | i | Middle |
| ຣ | ro ling - monkey | /l/ | n | Low |
| ລ | lo loot - gong | /l/ | l | Low |
| ວ | wii - fan | /w/ | o | Low |
| ຫ | haan - goose | /h/ | - | High |
| ອ | o - bowl (vowel-carrier) | /?/ | - | Middle |
| ຮ | heuan - house | /h/ | - | Low |
Lao writes with 27 consonant letters - the leanest consonant set of the major Southeast Asian scripts, after its 1975 government reform deleted the duplicate letters Thai-style orthography kept. What the count loses, the tone system repays: every letter belongs to one of three tone classes (middle, high, low), printed in school charts with green, red and blue backgrounds, and the class plus the vowel plus any tone mark is what decides which of six tones a syllable actually carries. The consonant does not just say a sound - it casts a vote on the melody.
Two quirks make Lao a favorite of typographic trivia. The script wraps words in vowel signs that surround the consonant from above, below, in front and behind - the sign for a long o literally encircles its letter. And Unicode made two famous mistakes here: the character names for the letters f (two of them) and l (two of them) were swapped at encoding time in the 1990s, and standards bodies decided fixing the names would break more than it fixed - so to this day, the on-screen names say the opposite of the letters' real names, an error preserved like a fossil.
How to use
- Read the consonant table by tone class, not alphabetically: middle-class letters (green) are the common core - k, ch, s, d, t, b, p, y and the vowel-carrier o; high-class (red) are mostly the aspirates kh, th, ph plus f and h; low-class (blue) are the merged leftovers - the second kh, th, ph, the x-sounding s, n, m, l, w and h. The class is what the tone rules read first, so learners memorize it as part of the letter, the way English speakers memorize that c is usually soft before e.
- Handle finals with the table's last column: only sonorants and plain stops may end a syllable, and several change voice on the way - b ends as p, d as t. Aspirated and high-class letters cannot end syllables at all (the dash column). Then the vowels: Lao spells them from a dozen shapes that attach on all four sides of the consonant, always written left-to-right in speech order even when the glyphs render around it - the second table lists each short vowel with its long partner and the sign's position.
- Meet the three special spellings: the ai pair (two letters for one sound - a rolled-stem form and an unwound form, both /aj/), ao, and the am built from a dot-plus-m ring. Note the silent-consonant trick: no vowel can start a word, so the letter o (which is both a consonant anchor and a vowel itself) stands in as the mount for initial vowels. And Lao borrows its modern punctuation from French - exclamation points, question marks and guillemets - because periods never existed in the tradition.
Frequently asked questions
Why does Lao have three tone classes?
Because the classes are the fossil of consonants that once differed in voice. Old Lao (like Old Thai) distinguished voiced from voiceless consonants; when the voiced ones devoiced, they took their tone behavior with them, splitting the alphabet into three behavioral families. A syllable's tone is computed from the consonant's class, the vowel's length and any tone mark - a little formula every schoolchild internalizes. The 1975 reform merged duplicate letterforms (several pairs of same-sound letters became one), which is why modern Lao has 27 letters where Thai keeps 44: Lao let the merger delete letters, Thai kept both spellings alive. The tone classes survived the cleanup because they carry grammar-level information - delete them and every dictionary would need tone marked separately.
What are the Unicode name reversals?
Encoding-era typos that became permanent. When the Lao block was added to Unicode in the early 1990s, the character names for the two f-letters were swapped - the one everyone reads as FO TAM is named FO SUNG in the standard, and vice versa - and the same happened to the two l-letters (LO LING and LO LOOT). The Wikipedia source table flags both with notes, because anyone reading Unicode charts or programming text engines hits the reversed names. The standards process decided that renaming would break implementations for a cosmetic gain, so the wrong names stand: the glyphs are correct, the names are lies. It is the textbook case of 'minting is forever' in character encoding, cited whenever new scripts are added.
How did the 1975 spelling reform change the script?
It simplified in the opposite direction from most reforms: instead of regularizing spelling toward etymology, Lao simplified toward pronunciation. Duplicate letters (same sound, different class or origin) were pruned, certain Indic-style silent markings were dropped, and the result was a 27-letter alphabet that maps to spoken sounds more directly than Thai's 44. The reform is also why Lao texts feel 'shallower' as abugidas - some inherent-vowel machinery of the older orthography was streamlined away. Compare a pre-1975 book with a modern newspaper and the difference is immediately visible; learners today study the reformed set, which is what the table above shows.
Why do vowel signs appear on both sides of a consonant?
Lao vowels wrap. The sign for short o, for example, is written as a small circle above and the letter o-shadow below-and-after - visually enclosing the consonant - and several others place a piece before the consonant even though the vowel comes after it in speech. Fonts and shaping engines handle the reordering; the writer types in speech order. This four-sided architecture (up, down, before, behind) is shared with Thai and inherited from the Khmer tradition, and it is why Lao text needs generous line spacing - a syllable is not a row of letters so much as a small cluster of marks orbiting one base.
Is Lao readable if I know Thai?
Partially, and the relationship runs deep. The two scripts are siblings from the same Khmer-derived tradition: the letterforms differ (Lao is rounder and more open), but the architecture - tone classes, wrap-around vowels, the silent-consonant vowel mount - maps almost one-to-one. A Thai reader can crack Lao in days; the vocabulary overlap in Isan (northeastern Thailand's Lao dialect) makes real texts surprisingly tractable. The traps are systematic rather than random: Lao merged letter pairs Thai keeps separate (so Thai spelling habits mislead), Lao tone rules differ in detail even where the classes match, and the two languages' cognates often differ in tone exactly where their histories split. Read the two tables side by side - the family resemblance does the teaching.