The Kayah Li alphabet (Kayah Li: ) is used to write the Kayah languages Eastern Kayah Li and Western Kayah Li, which are members of Karenic branch of the

Sino-Tibetan language family Sino-Tibetan (also referred to as Trans-Himalayan) is a language family, family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European languages, Indo-European in number of native speakers. Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan languag ...

. They are also known as Red Karen and Karenni. Eastern Kayah Li is spoken by about 26,000 people, and Western Kayah Li by about 100,000 people, mostly in the Kayah and Karen states of

Myanmar Myanmar, officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar; and also referred to as Burma (the official English name until 1989), is a country in northwest Southeast Asia. It is the largest country by area in Mainland Southeast Asia and has ...

, but also by people living in

Thailand Thailand, officially the Kingdom of Thailand and historically known as Siam (the official name until 1939), is a country in Southeast Asia on the Mainland Southeast Asia, Indochinese Peninsula. With a population of almost 66 million, it spa ...

History

Kayah Li script was devised by Htae Bu Phae in March 1962, in part in response to the appearance of Latin-based orthographies which had appeared after 1950. It is taught in schools in refugee camps in Thailand. Kayah Li’s relation to

Brahmic scripts The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout South Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India and are used b ...

can be seen in its ordering and the shapes of some of its letters, although the shapes of most of them were developed independently. At least nine of its characters bear a relation to characters in the Myanmar script.

Description

Unlike the Myanmar script, the Kayah Li script is an alphabet proper as the consonant letters do not have any subsequent vowel. Four of the vowels are written with separate letter, the others are written using a combination of the letter for ''a'' and a diacritic marker. The diacritics can also be used in combination with the letter for ''ô'' to represent sounds occurring in

loanwords A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...

. There is also a set of three diacritics that are used to indicate tone. Unlike the vowel diacritics, that are written above the letter, these are written under.

Vowels

Vowels used for loanwords

Tone markers

Consonants

Numerals

Unicode

Kayah Li was added to the

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

Standard in April, 2008 with the release of version 5.1. The Unicode block for Kayah Li is U+A900–U+A92F:

External links

Page on Omniglot about Kayah Li

Unicode Kayah Li chart

GNU FreeFont
a Unicode font with support for Kayah Li

References

* {{list of writing systems Alphabets Karenic languages