Lithuanian Alphabet: Nosinės ą ę į ų and Why y Follows į

Which Lithuanian letters spell a long vowel?

Of the Lithuanian alphabet letters, ą, ę, ė, į, ų, ū and y do. Lithuanian vowels come short and long, and the long ones often get a letter of their own. The education ministry's reference on sounds and letters (opens in a new tab) gives the short vowels as a, e, i, o, u. It gives the long ones as a, ą, e, ę, ė, y, į, o, ū, ų. Laid out by vowel, that list looks like this.

Vowel	Short, written as	Long, written as
a	a	a or ą
e	e	e or ę
ė	(no short form)	ė
i	i	y or į
o	o	o
u	u	ū or ų

Three rows have two letters for one long sound. The choice is not about how the word sounds. VLE's article on Lithuanian spelling (opens in a new tab) explains it: ą, ę, į and ų mark long vowels that grew out of an, en, in and un. So į and ų record where the vowel came from, and y and ū do not.

The a and e rows work a little differently. The same article says ą and ę mark only the long vowels that came from an and en. Any other long a is written with a plain a. Wiktionary's entry for namas (opens in a new tab), house, shows one: it transcribes the a as [ɑː], a long a, written with a plain a.

So a Lithuanian writer cannot hear which letter to use. A long i may be y or į, and a long u may be ū or ų. VLE calls Lithuanian spelling moderately morphological: the form of the word often decides.

Why do ą, ę, į and ų carry a nasal hook in Lithuanian?

Because they once wrote nasal vowels. VLE's entry on nasal vowels (opens in a new tab) says the southern West Aukštaitian dialect, the base of standard Lithuanian, still had them in the 16th and 17th centuries. Ą and ę were borrowed from Polish to write them. Ų and į were made new. The vowels later lost their nasal sound, but the letters stayed.

Today these four letters, the nosinės, write long vowels, and they turn up mostly in endings. VLE names the accusative singular and the genitive plural of declined words first. The Wiktionary table for namas has both: nãmą, the house as an object, and namų̃, of the houses. They also appear in some roots, where related words swap them with an, en, in or un.

VLE's spelling article says that in 1929 to 1933 a reform tried to give up the nasal letters and mark long vowels one way. The attempt failed, and the hooks remain.

Why does y come right after į in the Lithuanian alphabet?

Because y is a kind of i. VLE's entry on the letter i (opens in a new tab) says Lithuanian i and its modified forms write two sounds: a short /i/ and a long /i·/. The long one is written Y y or Į į. Y came from Greek upsilon by way of Latin, and was first used for the long i in Lithuania Minor.

The alphabet keeps the family together: i, į, y, then j. The EU Publications Office list (opens in a new tab) gives Lithuanian in that order, and so does the CLDR Lithuanian collation chart (opens in a new tab) that software follows.

Sorting goes one step further. We tested it on 2026-10-10 with the locale-aware compare in Node.js v26.0.0, which runs ICU 78.3 on CLDR 48 data. Under Lithuanian rules, the long-vowel letters sort as their base vowel, but č, š and ž do not.

Letters	Their place in the alphabet	In a sorted list, under Lithuanian rules
ą, ę, ė, į, ų, ū	after their base vowel	filed with it: ąsa comes before atis
y	after į, before j	filed with i: ypač comes before ir
č, š, ž	after c, s, z	a letter of their own: šuo comes after sūris

English rules give a different list. They put ypač after jis, and šuo before sūris. A control row agreed under both: ūkis came after ugnis either way. In the same test we compared at the strength that ignores accents. Lithuanian rules matched yra with ira and ąsa with asa, but kept šuo apart from suo.

Which accent marks does a Lithuanian dictionary add?

The Lithuanian accent marks of a dictionary are three stress marks: the acute, the tilde and the grave. VLE's entry on stress (opens in a new tab) says Lithuanian stress is free. It can fall on any syllable, and moving it can change the word.

A stressed long syllable also carries one of two pitch accents, says VLE's entry priegaidė (opens in a new tab). These are the acute and the circumflex. VLE gives pairs that the pitch tells apart: šáuk and šaũk, and klõstė, a noun, and klóstė, a verb.

These marks are not letters. VLE's spelling article lists stress marks beside punctuation, as signs used in writing besides the letters. Reference works add them: VLE prints its own headwords with them, as in kirčiãvimas, and Wiktionary writes nãmas. Each mark has a Lithuanian name. The table takes the job of each from VLE's entries for the acute (opens in a new tab), the circumflex (opens in a new tab) and the grave (opens in a new tab).

Mark	Lithuanian name	What it shows	VLE's example
´	dešininis, the akūtas	acute pitch on a long syllable	káimas
˜	riestinis, the cirkumfleksas	circumflex pitch on a long syllable	šaũk
`	kairinis, the gravis	stress on a short syllable; also the acute in il, um, ir, un and similar	naštà, kùrmis

This is why the auxiliary letters on this page are not mostly foreign letters. For Lithuanian, CLDR's auxiliary set is mostly these stressed forms of its own vowels: á, ą́, ẽ, ė̃, ū́. The rest are q, w, x and ñ, the digraphs ch, dz and dž, and even the consonants j̃, l̃, m̃ and r̃ with a tilde. The CLDR alphabetic information chart (opens in a new tab) lists the set.

Many of these forms have no code point of their own. In our 2026-10-10 test, á stayed one character after Unicode normalization. Ą́, ą̃, ę́, ų́ and ū̃ stayed two each: the base letter, then a combining acute or tilde. A font has to stack the mark, and a search must match both parts.

Why does Lithuanian keep the dot on i under an accent?

Because Unicode has a casing rule for Lithuanian alone. The file SpecialCasing.txt (opens in a new tab) says Lithuanian retains the dot in a lowercase i when an accent follows. So a stressed i is written i̇́: an i, a combining dot above, and the acute on top. Wiktionary writes the plural of namas that way, namai̇̃, with the dot under the tilde.

We checked what this does to text on 2026-10-10, in the same Node.js build. Í in lowercase under Lithuanian rules came out as three code points, U+0069 U+0307 U+0301. Under English rules it came out as one, í. Going back up, Lithuanian rules dropped the dot again and gave Í.

That matters when a program compares strings. An exact or a normalized comparison says i̇́ and í differ. A Lithuanian collator that ignores case, but not accents, treated them as equal. The English one did not. If a search over Lithuanian dictionary text misses a word, set it to Lithuanian rules, or strip the stress marks first.

Can a Lithuanian passport spell a name with w, q or x?

Yes, in some cases since 2022. LRT, the national broadcaster, reported (opens in a new tab) in January 2022 that the parliament had allowed q, x and w in personal documents. One case it named is a citizen who takes a non-Lithuanian spouse's surname. LRT describes them as letters that do not exist in the Lithuanian alphabet.

The detail is in the government's rules on writing names, Resolution No. 424 (opens in a new tab), in the consolidated text in force since 1 March 2024. By default a citizen's name is written in Lithuanian letters.

Under point 10, a citizen whose recorded ethnicity is not Lithuanian may ask for the name in Latin letters without diacritics. Point 15 covers a name copied from a document in Latin letters: it is copied letter by letter, again without diacritics. Both points make one exception, letters with the same marks as the Lithuanian alphabet.

A letter in the source name	In a Lithuanian document under these rules
w, q, x	may be written, in the cases the rules allow
č, š, ž, ą, ę, ė, į, ų, ū	kept with the mark, as letters of the Lithuanian alphabet
a mark Lithuanian lacks, such as the one on ö or é	dropped, leaving the plain Latin letter

So the alphabet decides even here. A Lithuanian document can hold a w, but it keeps only the marks that the Lithuanian alphabet itself has.