Lao script

Lao Script

Lao script, also called Akson Lao, is the main way people write the Lao language in Laos. It has special letters called consonants, vowels, and marks that show sounds. There are 27 consonants, 33 vowels, and 4 tone marks.

Lao script looks a bit like the Thai script but has fewer letters and more rounded shapes. When people write in Lao, they write from left to right like English. Vowels can be placed above, below, in front of, or behind the consonants.

The Lao script came from an older script called Tai Noi and was changed from the Khmer script. The Khmer script itself came from scripts used in southern India a long time ago.

Lao script is used to write Pali and Sanskrit words too. In the 1930s, a Buddhist scholar added new Lao letters to help with this. These letters were not used often and stopped being used by 1975. In the 1960s, the Lao People's Revolutionary Party made the spelling simpler and took away some extra letters. In 2019, the extra letters were added to Unicode 12.

Lao writing does not usually have spaces between words. Spaces are only used to show the end of a clause or sentence. Old Lao writing had special marks, but today, Lao writing often uses punctuation from French, such as exclamation points (!), question marks (?), and parentheses (). Quotation marks «» or "" are also used. Hyphens (-) and the ellipsis (...) are common in today’s writing.

The Lao script has special symbols for numbers. These symbols are used to write numbers in a shorter way.