Sorbian alphabet
Encyclopedia
The Sorbian alphabet is based on the basic Latin alphabet but uses diacritic
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...

s such as the acute accent
Acute accent
The acute accent is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-Apex:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.-Greek:...

 and the caron
Caron
A caron or háček , also known as a wedge, inverted circumflex, inverted hat, is a diacritic placed over certain letters to indicate present or historical palatalization, iotation, or postalveolar pronunciation in the orthography of some Baltic, Slavic, Finno-Lappic, and other languages.It looks...

, making it similar to the Czech
Czech alphabet
The Czech alphabet is a version of the Latin script, used when writing Czech. Its basic principles are "one sound, one letter" and the addition of diacritical marks above letters to represent sounds alien to Latin...

 and Polish
Polish alphabet
The Polish alphabet is the script of the Polish language, the basis for the Polish system of orthography . It is based on the Latin alphabet, but includes certain letters with diacritics: the line or kreska, which is graphically similar to an acute accent ; the overdot or kropka ; the tail or...

 alphabets. The standard character encoding for the Sorbian alphabet is ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2).

The alphabet is used for the Sorbian languages
Sorbian languages
The Sorbian languages are classified under the Slavic branch of the Indo-European languages. They are the native languages of the Sorbs, a Slavic minority in the Lusatia region of eastern Germany. Historically the language has also been known as Wendish or Lusatian. Their collective ISO 639-2 code...

, although some letters are used in only one of the two languages (Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian).
Upper
case
HTML
code
Lower
case
HTML
code
Name Usual
phonetic value
Other
phonetic values
Comments
A   a   a [a]    
B   b   bej [b] [p]  
C   c   cej [ts]    
Č Č č č čej [tʃ]    
Ć Ć ć ć ćet [tɕ]    
D   d   dej [d] [t]  
E   e   ej [ɛ]    
Ě Ě ě ě jět/ět (Upper), ět (Lower) [iɪ]    
F   f   ef [f]    
G   g   gej [ɡ]    
H   h   ha Upper [h]
Lower [h] or silent
   
I   i   i [i]    
J   j   jot/jót (Upper), jot (Lower) [j]    
K   k   ka [k]    
Ł Ł ł ł [w]    
L   l   el [l]    
M   m   em [m]    
N   n   en [n]    
Ń Ń ń ń eń (Upper), ejn (Lower) [ɲ]    
O   o   o [ɔ]    
Ó Ó ó ó ót Upper [uʊ]
Lower [ɛ] or [ɨ]
   
P   p   pej [p]    
R   r   er [r]    
Ř Ř ř ř [ʃ]   Upper Sorbian only
Ŕ Ŕ ŕ ŕ ejŕ [rʲ]   Lower Sorbian only
S   s   es [s] [z], [ɕ]  
Š Š š š [ʃ]    
Ś Ś ś ś śej [ɕ] [ʑ] Lower Sorbian only
T   t   tej [t] [d]  
U   u   u [u]    
W   w   wej Upper [v]
Lower [w] or silent
Upper Sorbian [f]  
Y   y   y [ɨ]    
Z   z   zet [z] [s], [ʑ]  
Ž Ž ž ž žet [ʒ]    
Ź Ź ź ź źej [ʑ]   Lower Sorbian only
(except as part of digraph )


An earlier version of the Lower Sorbian alphabet included the use of the letters and to indicate palatalized labials. These have been replaced by bj, mj, pj and wj.

Sorbian orthography also includes two digraph
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...

s:
Upper
case
HTML
code
Lower
case
HTML
code
Name Usual
phonetic value
Other
phonetic values
Ch   ch   cha Upper [kʰ]
Lower [x]
 
Dź dź dźej/dźet [dʑ] [tɕ]


The digraph ch follows h in alphabetical order.
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