Latvian Alphabet: Soft ģ ķ ļ ņ, Their Comma and the Lost ŗ

What do ģ, ķ, ļ and ņ sound like in Latvian?

The Latvian letters ģ, ķ, ļ and ņ are soft consonants. In the Latvian alphabet, the mark under ķ, ļ and ņ, and over the small ģ, turns a hard g, k, l or n into its soft partner. Latvians call it the mīkstinājuma zīme, the softening mark. Tēzaurs.lv (opens in a new tab) defines it as a diacritic used to write softened or soft consonants.

Wiktionary's transcriptions give each of these Latvian alphabet letters one IPA symbol of its own, not a consonant followed by a y sound. The words below come from its entries for ģimene (opens in a new tab), ķirsis (opens in a new tab), ļoti (opens in a new tab) and ņemt (opens in a new tab).

Letter	Sound, in IPA	A word with it	What the word means
ģ	/ɟ/	ģimene /ˈɟimɛnɛ/	family
ķ	/c/	ķirsis /ˈcîɾsis/	cherry tree, cherry
ļ	/ʎ/	ļoti /ʎùoti/	very
ņ	/ɲ/	ņemt /ɲɛ̂mt/	to take

The soft letters also turn up inside the grammar. Wiktionary's table for suns (opens in a new tab), dog, gives its plural as suņi, with ņ. The n of the singular softens before the plural ending, and the spelling shows it. In kaķis (opens in a new tab), cat, the soft ķ is part of the root, transcribed /ˈkacːis/.

Why does the Latvian ģ carry its mark on top?

The small Latvian ģ carries its mark on top because the g has no room below. The g hangs a loop under the line, and a mark under it would hit the next line or float far from the letter. The Unicode Standard, chapter 7 (opens in a new tab), puts it plainly: good Latvian typography shows ģ with a rotated comma over the g, not a cedilla below it.

The capital does the opposite. Unicode says Ģ is always shown with the mark below, since the round bottom of G gives it a place to sit. So one Latvian letter wears its mark in two places, depending on case.

Form	Where the mark sits	What Unicode says about it
ģ, small	above, a turned comma	the form of good Latvian typography
Ģ, capital	below the letter	always shown below
ķ and ņ, and the old ŗ	below, a comma that floats free	no proper attachment point for a cedilla
ģ in a poor font	above, an acute accent	a substitute for the turned comma

Unicode's names list (opens in a new tab) adds a note to U+0123: there are several major glyph variants of ģ. Seen side by side, ģ with a comma, with an acute and with a cedilla look like three letters. They are one code point.

Getting the capital right is harder than it looks, even in official text. We downloaded the consolidated text of Cabinet Regulation No. 114 (opens in a new tab) from likumi.lv on 2026-10-10 and read its code points. Point 6.1, the list of capital letters allowed in names, has Ğ there: U+011E, a G with a breve, the Turkish letter. The small-letter list in point 6.2 has the right ģ. The proper capital Ģ, U+0122, does appear elsewhere in the same file.

Is the Latvian softening mark a cedilla or a comma?

The Latvian softening mark is drawn as a comma but encoded as a cedilla. The Unicode names say "with cedilla": U+0137 is LATIN SMALL LETTER K WITH CEDILLA. Each of these Latvian special characters breaks down into its base letter plus U+0327, COMBINING CEDILLA. Yet the names list adds a note to ķ, ļ and ņ: "despite their names", these pairs "should normally be displayed with a comma below".

Romanian solved the same problem another way. It got new letters, ș and ț, that break down into s or t plus U+0326, COMBINING COMMA BELOW. Latvian never did. We checked on 2026-10-10 with Node.js v26.0.0, which carries Unicode 17.0 data.

Latvian letter	Unicode name ends in	Breaks down into	Is there a "comma below" letter for it?
ķ	K WITH CEDILLA	k + U+0327	no: k + U+0326 stays two characters
ļ	L WITH CEDILLA	l + U+0327	no
ņ	N WITH CEDILLA	n + U+0327	no
ģ	G WITH CEDILLA	g + U+0327	no

The control case is Romanian: s + U+0326 joined into the single letter ș under the same normalization. A search of the names list for Latin letters with a comma below finds only the s and t pairs.

What this means in practice: type or copy the cedilla code points. They are the real Latvian letters, and a font with good Latvian support draws the comma for you. Unicode's chapter 7 says U+0327 may be drawn in many shapes, and that Latvian prefers a comma below.

Which letters has Latvian spelling dropped?

Latvian spelling dropped the soft ŗ and the pair ch in the 20th century. Dzintra Paegle's paper (opens in a new tab), published by the University of Latvia, traces both. The spelling it starts from is the one Jānis Endzelīns worked out, adopted in 1922.

Letter	What happened, by Paegle's account	What is written now
ŗ	1938 rules: "r nemīkstināt", do not soften r. 1939: both spellings allowed. 1940: the 1938 and 1939 rules repealed. 1946 rules: not used in practical writing	r
ch	1939 rules: ch for the foreign sound, as in chiromantija. 1946 rules: no longer mentioned. December 1957: a decision of the Latvian SSR Council of Ministers says to write h	h

Wiktionary marks ŗ (opens in a new tab) as an obsolete Latvian letter. It was replaced with r because the soft r sound is not found in the standard language. Unicode's names list now tags ŗ with Livonian, not Latvian.

The old letters have not vanished from the data. For Latvian, the CLDR (opens in a new tab) auxiliary set holds ō and ŗ next to q, w, x and y. On 2026-10-10 the letter strip on tezaurs.lv still offered Ō and Ŗ among the keys it gives for typing Latvian.

Before that, Latvian had already changed its letters once. Unicode's chapter 7 says Latvian was set in Fraktur through the 19th century. Fraktur handled loose marks badly, so the soft letters were made with a bar through them. Unicode dates the new spelling that replaced them with today's marked letters to 1921.

What did losing ŗ do to spoken Latvian?

Losing ŗ changed how Latvians say a vowel that the letter used to protect. Paegle's paper says the soft r came with a narrow e, the closed vowel of standard Latvian. With ŗ gone from the page, the young generation says verbs such as dzeru, veru, ķeru and sveru only with the broad, open e, /æ/.

The rule is still on the books. Paegle quotes the 2015 grammar of Latvian by Nītiņa and Grigorjevs: first-conjugation verbs with r at the end of the root, such as sveru and dzeru, take the narrow e. The grammar admits that many speakers ignore the norm, and says it is still in force.

The soft r itself survives in speech. Paegle cites the Latvian dialect atlas: across most of Latvia the sound is gone, but older speakers use it in all the dialects of Kurzeme and in part of those of western Zemgale and western Vidzeme. A 2016 study she quotes found it still steady in Rucava and Bārta in the 21st century.

How do Latvian letters reshape a foreign name?

Latvian letters decide how a foreign name is spelled in Latvian. Cabinet Regulation No. 114 (opens in a new tab) says that personal names use only the letters of the official Latvian alphabet. It lists the Latvian alphabet letters in full and then sets rules for names from other Latin-script languages: write them as they sound, and give them a Latvian ending.

The rules ban the borrowed letter groups bh, ch, cz, dh, dt, ph, sch, sz, tc, th and tz where they spell one sound. A long vowel gets the line over it, not a double letter or an h. The examples below are the regulation's own.

Original name	Latvian form	The rule at work
Walter	Volters	the w sound is written v (point 93.4.7)
Keith	Kīts	a long vowel takes the line, as ī (point 91.1)
Lennox	Lenokss	nn becomes n in a word of more than one syllable (point 93.3), and x is written ks
Griffith	Grifits	a doubled ff becomes f (point 93.1)
Schultz, Shulz, Szulc	Šulcs	one name, one Latvian form, with š (point 63)
Невский, Nevsky, Newskij	Ņevskis	the soft ņ, and the ending -is (point 63)

The last row ties back to the soft letters. The regulation spells the Russian Невский as Ņevskis, with ņ, though the English and German spellings it lists start with a plain N.