Check the quality of your Lao translation

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 vowels

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 weekMonday
Working daysMonday to Friday
Short date formatdd/MM/yyyy
e.g. 23/03/2016
Long date formatdd 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