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Lao alphabet and characters
The Lao alphabet should display only the following characters. If your document is not showing correctly, then first check that the encoding for that program and font supports Lao.
Lao, like many languages in Laos, is written in the Lao script, an abugida. The Lao scripts is composed of 78 characters and signs: 33 Consonants, 28 Vowels, 04 Tone marks, 03 Special symbols and 10 Lao digits. There are no lower case and upper case.
Some vowels can appear next to, above, or below a consonant.
Lao grammar rules
Lao is an analytic language which means that it does not use inflections to represent grammatical relations, such as case, gender, number or tense. The syntactic function of words is marked by word order and by various particles that follow nouns and verbs, rather than by inflections, as is the case in Indo-European languages.
Nouns are not marked for number, gender or case. A noun can be singular or plural. There are no definite or indefinite articles.
Measure words are often used to express plural but the noun itself remains unchanged.
Lao formatting rules
| First day of the week | Monday |
| Working days | Monday to Friday |
| Short date format | dd/MM/yyyy |
| e.g. 23/03/2016 | |
| Long date format | dd MMMM, yyyy |
| e.g. 23 ສິງຫາ, 2016 |
Lao capitalisation usage
This section does not apply to Lao.
Solutions for Lao
Stepping Stone provides translation and localisation services for Lao