The Sorbian alphabet is based on the

ISO basic Latin alphabet The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard (beginning with ISO/IEC 646) for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets (uppercase and lowercase) of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and u ...

but uses

diacritic 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 ...

s such as 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 ...

and the

caron A caron or háček ( ), is a diacritic mark () placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages, to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation. Typographers tend to use the term ''caron'', while linguists prefer ...

, making it similar to the Czech and Polish alphabets. (This mixture is also found in the

Belarusian Latin alphabet The Belarusian Latin alphabet or Łacinka (from , BGN/PCGN romanization of Belarusian, BGN/PCGN: , ) for the Latin script in general is the Latin script as used to write Belarusian. It is similar to the Sorbian alphabet and incorporates feat ...

.) The standard character encoding for the Sorbian alphabet is

ISO 8859-2 ISO/IEC 8859-2:1999, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 2: Latin alphabet No. 2'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. I ...

(Latin-2). The alphabet is used for the

Sorbian languages The Sorbian languages (, ) are the Upper Sorbian language and Lower Sorbian language, two closely related and partially mutually intelligible languages spoken by the Sorbs, a West Slavs, West Slavic ethno-cultural minority in the Lusatia region ...

, although some letters are used in only one of the two languages ( Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian).

Alphabet table

An earlier version of the Lower Sorbian alphabet included the use of the letters ''b́'' (or ''b’''), ''ṕ'' (or ''p’''), ''ḿ'' (or ''m’''), ''ẃ'' (or ''w’'') and rarely ''f́'' (or ''f’'') to indicate palatalized labials. These have been replaced by ''bj, pj, mj, wj'', and ''fj''. Sorbian orthography also includes two digraphs: The digraph ch follows h in alphabetical order. These letters are used in foreign words and names:

References

* Jana Šołćina, Edward Wornar: Obersorbisch im Selbststudium, Hornjoserbšćina za samostudij, Bautzen 2000, , Seiten 12–15 * Starosta: Dolnoserbsko-nimski słownik, Niedersorbisch-deutsches Wörterbuch, Bautzen 1999, , Seiten 15–21 {{DEFAULTSORT:Sorbian Alphabet

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 ...

Latin alphabets West Slavic languages Sorbian culture