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Laz Alphabet

Laz is written with two alphabets. In Turkey it uses a Latin one, designed in 1984 by Fahri Lazoğlu and the Austrian linguist Wolfgang Feurstein, building on the writing systems Laz speakers had used in Soviet Abkhazia in the 1920s and 1930s. In Georgia it is written in Mkhedruli, the Georgian script.

The Latin alphabet is built on the Turkish one, with extra letters for sounds Turkish does not have. The table below gives both scripts, the sound in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and a word from this site’s dictionary so you can see each letter doing its job.

The sounds that are hard for outsiders

Five letters — ç̌, Ǩ, p̌, ť and Ǯ — are ejectives. The sound is made by closing the throat and releasing the air sharply, without the puff that follows an English p or k. They are a defining feature of the South Caucasian family, and the caron above the letter is what marks them.

Q q is made far back in the throat, further than any English sound. It appears only in the dialects of Hopa, Borçka and Batumi; speakers further west do without it.

Laz has five vowels — a, e, i, o, u — where Turkish has eight. There is no ı, no ö and no ü.

Why two alphabets

The border drawn in 1921 cut the Laz homeland in two, and the two halves learned to write in the scripts of the states they found themselves in. A Laz speaker in Rize writes nana; one in Batumi writes ნანა. It is the same word, the same language, and the same mother.

Both spellings are given for every word in the dictionary, so a reader who knows one script can find a word written in the other.

Sources

The alphabet table follows the English and Turkish Wikipedia articles on the Laz language, which agree on every letter. Example words come from the dictionary on this site, compiled from Wiktionary.