The Georgian Alphabet (Mkhedruli)

The Georgian Alphabet (Mkhedruli)

Georgian is written in Mkhedruli, an alphabet of 33 letters - 5 vowels and 28 consonants - and each one stands for exactly one sound. There are no silent letters, no digraphs and no spelling rules to memorise: say the letters in order and you have said the word. Two things do take real work, and this page is built around them - the three-way contrast in the stops and affricates, and the letter ყ.

All 33 letters

Every letter carries a traditional name (ან, ბან, გან and so on) - the same names Unicode uses for the code points U+10D0 to U+10F0. The examples below are words you will actually meet: on a menu in Tbilisi, on a wine label from Racha, on a road sign in Svaneti.

Three series of stops, not two

English sorts its stops into two boxes, voiced and voiceless. Georgian uses three, and the third box is a set of separate words. The middle column is the one English speakers already own - the p of pot is aspirated - while the right-hand column has to be built from scratch.

Learn these as sets rather than as pairs. Confusing ფური with პური turns a cow into a loaf of bread, and ქარი (wind) into კარი (door). An ejective is not simply a harder k. Close the vocal folds, build pressure with the tongue or lips alone, and release: the lungs never push. Airflow measurements of Georgian ejectives show the oral flow rising from zero and falling back to zero, because all the air comes from the small pocket trapped between the shut glottis and the closed mouth.

ყ, the uvular ejective

ყ is /qʼ/ - an ejective made at the uvula, well behind where k is made. Two gestures happen at once and neither is optional:

• The back of the tongue seals against the uvula, deeper than for კ and much deeper than for the k of key.
• The vocal folds shut underneath, and the larynx rises like a piston to compress the trapped air. The release is that pocket escaping - not breath from the lungs.

A quick self-test: hold your breath and say ყავა (coffee). If it comes out, the air was not coming from your lungs. Then drill the depth with three real words: ქუდი (hat, aspirated ქ), კუდი (tail, velar ejective კ), ყუთი (box, uvular ejective ყ). Georgians vary here - the same speaker may release ყ as a full stop, as a stop plus a scrape, or as little more than a catch in the throat - so get the glottal squeeze first and fine-tune the depth later.

Capital letters: almost none, but not none

In running text Mkhedruli is unicameral. Sentences do not open with a big letter, თბილისი and ანა look the same at the start of a sentence as in the middle, and there are no capitalisation rules to learn because there are none.

What does exist is Mtavruli (მთავრული), an all-caps display style used for headlines, shop fronts, ID cards and emphasis - much as a Latin-alphabet designer sets a poster IN CAPS. Unicode gave it its own characters in the Georgian Extended block (U+1C90 to U+1CBF) in version 11.0, each one case-mapped to its Mkhedruli letter. So the accurate statement is not "Georgian has no capitals" but "Georgian has no sentence-initial capitalisation, and it does have capital letterforms".

Consonant clusters, and why they are not chaos

Georgian will put eight consonants in front of a vowel without blinking. გვფრცქვნი means "you peel us", and it is an ordinary word rather than a party trick. Three things make it sayable:

• Every consonant carries meaning. გვ- is "us", ფრცქვნ- is the root "peel", -ი closes off the present-tense form. A speaker is stacking morphemes, not reciting a random string - the same way an English speaker gets through strengths.
• Clusters are harmonic. Where two obstruents meet they normally share one laryngeal setting: both voiced (ძღვენი, a gift), both voiceless (თხილი, the hazelnut that goes into churchkhela), or both ejective (ტყე forest, წყალი water). The larynx is set once and only the tongue moves, so the pair costs one gesture instead of two.
• Nothing is inserted. The temptation is to slip a small "uh" between the consonants. Resist it: each stop gets its own clean release, and the sonorants ვ, რ, ლ, მ, ნ can carry a syllable on their own.

Build up on real words: მთა (mountain), ცხენი (horse), ტყე (forest), ღვინო (wine), ქვევრი (the buried clay jar the wine ferments in), მწვრთნელი (coach), and only then გვფრცქვნი.

Three scripts, one alphabet

Mkhedruli is the youngest of three Georgian scripts, and all three are still in use. The oldest is Asomtavruli - UNESCO's inscription calls it Mrgvlovani, "the rounded one" - attested in inscriptions from the fifth century. From it came Nuskhuri, an angular minuscule; together the two form the ecclesiastical Khutsuri script that the Georgian Orthodox Church still writes on icons and in hymnals, and that goldsmiths and embroiderers still work in. Mkhedruli, the "cavalry" or secular hand, has been the everyday script since the eleventh century and is what schools teach.

In 2016 UNESCO inscribed the "Living culture of three writing systems of the Georgian alphabet" on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity - precisely because all three are living practice rather than archaeology.