The Occitan alphabet consists of the following 23 Latin letters: : The letters '' K, W'' and '' Y'' are considered foreign by Occitanians and are used only in words of foreign origin, incrementally integrated into Occitan, such as ''whisky'', ''watt'', ''Kenya''. They may be included in the Occitan alphabet following the order in the international alphabet.Preconizacions del Conselh de la Lenga Occitana (PDF)
(standard Occitan orthography).

Letter names

The letter names are usually feminine. They may also be masculine, in which case the feminine names (''B''), (''V''), (''W'') and (''Y'') become masculine , , and .

Elision In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant, or a whole syllable) in a word or phrase. However, these terms are also used to refer more narrowly to cases where two words are run to ...

is common before a letter starting with a vowel.

Diacritics

Several

diacritics A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

serve to modify the pronunciation of the letters of the Occitan alphabet. * The

grave accent The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and many other Western European languages as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other ...

() _̀ found on à, è, ò, indicates stressed, close vowels. * The

acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...

() _́ found on á, é, í, ó, ú, indicates stressed, open vowels. * The diaeresis () ¨ found on ï, ü, indicates that ''ï'' and ''ü'' are pronounced separately from a previous letter. * The

cedilla A cedilla ( ; from Spanish language, Spanish ', "small ''ceda''", i.e. small "z"), or cedille (from French , ), is a hook or tail () added under certain letters (as a diacritic, diacritical mark) to indicate that their pronunciation is modif ...

() ¸ found under ç, indicates that ''ç'' is pronounced not * The

interpunct An interpunct , also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot, centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in Classical Latin. ( Word-separating spaces did not appe ...

() · found between two consecutive consonants: n·h and s·h and indicates a distinction between ''n·h'' and ''nh'' or ''s·h'' and ''sh''. This is used in Gascon Occitan, which features as an allophone of . In the

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and ...

, the interpunct was common throughout Aquitania (see

Old Occitan Old Occitan (, ), also called Old Provençal, was the earliest form of the Occitano-Romance languages, as attested in writings dating from the 8th to the 14th centuries. Old Occitan generally includes Early and Old Occitan. Middle Occitan is some ...

). The diacritics are required on the capitals. For example: , , , , , .

Sound-to-spelling correspondences

Unless noted, regional IPA values are the same as Standard Occitan. Despite being listed as dialect of Occitan, Gascon are listed as separate language here and it is excluded from this list.

Consonants

Vowels

References

{{reflist

External links

Omniglot
* http://www.orbilat.com/Languages/Occitan/Grammar/Occitan-Alphabet.html Occitan

Alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...