WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Georgian
Georgian gives its name to the script and is the only language here that uses it, with 45 practice words to learn 28 distinct characters on. Georgian is typed on the Georgian QWERTY layout.
Around 1,600 years old, unrelated to anything else, and, unusually, it has no capital letters at all. No shift for letters, no capitalised names, and none of the case-conversion problems that occupy so much software elsewhere. Thirty-three letters, each representing exactly one sound. Two older Georgian alphabets survive in church use; together the three are on the UNESCO heritage list.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Key inventory
- 28 distinct characters across 45 practice words
- Composition
- one character per keystroke, nothing stacks
- Input
- typed directly on the keys
- Georgian keyboard layout
- Georgian QWERTY
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 24 of the 28 characters its practice words use
The Georgian keyboard
Drawn from Georgian’s key map.
- left little finger
- left ring finger
- left middle finger
- left index finger
- thumb
- right index finger
- right middle finger
- right ring finger
- right little finger
Physical key labels appear above. ქართული layout labels appear below. These three rows produce 24 of the 28 characters the practice words here use; the rest are reached with a modifier or a dead key.
The characters you will type most
Counted across every practice word in the language below, most frequent first. These are the keys worth finding without looking.
- ა 38
- ი 31
- ე 15
- ლ 13
- მ 11
- რ 11
- ხ 10
- ვ 9
- ო 7
- ს 7
The longest practice word in this script is ცხოვრება in Georgian.
The one language written in Georgian
Other writing systems
- Greek The ancestor of both Latin and Cyrillic, in continuous use for around three thousand years.
- Gujarati Derived from Devanagari and immediately distinguishable from it by what is missing: the horizontal line along the top of the letters.
- Gurmukhi Standardised in the sixteenth century by Guru Angad and used for Sikh scripture and for Punjabi in India.
There is a written guide for this script: Armenian and Georgian: two alphabets you can nearly guess. How the Armenian and Georgian alphabets differ, and how each is typed. Two unrelated scripts on two keyboards arranged by sound, measured key by key.
Every script this site teaches, with the languages written in each, is on the languages hub. If your computer does not produce these characters yet, that is a setting rather than a missing keyboard — adding a keyboard layout covers it for Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. The rest of the written guides cover what is the same whichever script you are in: posture, the home row, and why speed follows accuracy rather than the other way round.