WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Lao
Lao gives its name to the script and is the only language here that uses it, where the character count is not the key count: 31 distinct characters appear across 21 practice words. Lao is typed on the Lao Niyom layout.
Closely related to Thai and simpler, because Lao underwent a spelling reform that Thai did not: words are written broadly as they sound, where Thai keeps etymological spellings from Sanskrit and Pali. The practical result is 27 consonants against Thai's 44. Like Thai, it writes without spaces between words and stacks vowel marks around the consonant.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Key inventory
- 31 distinct characters across 21 practice words
- Composition
- marks stack or join onto the letters they modify
- Input
- typed directly on the keys
- Lao keyboard layout
- Lao Niyom
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 22 of the 31 characters its practice words use
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.
- ນ6
- ້5
- າ5
- ່4
- ີ4
- ໍ3
- ຍ3
- ດ3
- ມ3
- ວ3
The longest practice word in this script is ເວລາ in Lao.
The one language written in Lao
Other writing systems
- Malayalam One of the larger Indic character inventories, historically including several hundred ligature forms for consonant clusters.
- Myanmar A rounded abugida written without spaces between words, whose recent history is dominated by an encoding problem rather than a linguistic one.
- Odia Distinguished by the curved line running across the top of most letters — an adaptation, like Sinhala's rounded shapes, usually attributed to writing on palm leaves, where a straight horizontal stroke risked tearing along the grain.
There is a written guide for this script: Typing Khmer and Lao: the largest alphabet, and a simplified one. Khmer holds the record for the largest alphabet and Lao reformed its way to a small one. Two answers to one problem, and what each costs a typist.
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.