Home / Languages / Georgian

Georgian Alphabet

The letters and characters of Georgian written in the Georgian script, in order — every standard character with its name and codepoint, the additional and punctuation sets, and exactly how many fonts include them. About 4,324,687 people read or write it across 3 countries.

Standard characters

The minimal set of characters required for Georgian — the language's alphabet, in its traditional order. Tap a character to copy it; each name opens the full character page. The Fonts column counts how many fonts include each letter, in the same order as the letters and codepoints; an accented form under a letter gets its own codepoint and count line beneath it.

How the Georgian alphabet works

Georgian uses the Mkhedruli alphabet: 33 letters, no capitals, and one of the most faithful sound systems ever written — one letter, one sound, no silent letters, no combinations doing extra work. The capital-looking forms shown beside the letters in the chart are the Mtavruli, a modern display case used for headings and emphasis, not a true capital set. If you learn the 33 sounds, you can read any Georgian word aloud correctly the first time you see it.

The price of that simplicity is a three-way split among the stop consonants. Where English manages with two — b against p — Georgian has three: a voiced letter (b, d, g), a puffed one (p, t, k, said with a clear burst of air, much like English), and an ejective — p', t', k' and their partners, made by snapping the throat shut and popping the sound out with no breath at all. Ejectives also include the deepest letter in the alphabet, ყ (q'), popped from far back against the uvula. The chart marks every ejective with its pop, and the distinction is not decoration: confusing ტ with თ changes one word into another.

Georgian then lets consonants pile up in ways few languages allow — words can open with four, five, even six consonants in a row, and the spelling simply writes them one after another, each with its own letter. The vowels are only five (a, e, i, o, u) and never change their sound. For an English reader the exotic letters are few: ღ is a gargled g, ხ the ch of loch, and ჟ the s of measure — everything else is familiar once the ejectives are learned.

Additional Characters

Used for foreign words, names and technical terms, and older forms of the language.

Punctuation characters

The marks used to separate sentences and to clarify meaning.

Where Georgian is read

Countries shaded by the share of their population that reads or writes Georgian in the Georgian script. The map is zoomed to the region where at least 1% of a country's people read it; neighbouring countries are shown unshaded for context.