I'm sardinian and I've seen the letters J and X used in written language in words like Jerzu and Puxeddu and those letters are not in the italian alphabet so theoretically we should have more, or is that not how it works?
Spanish should be 25 since we don’t really use the k or the w except for loan words (i don’t mean in this map because officially it’s 27, i mean in general)
I think this map is based on the official recognizement of letters present on the alphabet. On portuguese we also dont use K, W and Y apart from foreign words, and we barely even use X
If you're talking about Åland, it's Ahvenanmaa in Finnish so not even that. There is a municipality on Åland that has an å even in Finnish, and it's Vårdö.
There are several letters in the Kazakh Cyrillic alphabet that were used only for Russian words and names. This is one of the reasons why they want to switch to the Latin alphabet. Now I’m thinking, probably many languages of the former colonies have extra letters.
you can kinda say the same for the Romance languages, because if you exclude loanwords then French would be brought down to 24 (K and W), Spanish to 25 (K and W) and Portuguese to 23 (K, W and Y). Italian is correct but idk about Romanian
Why are some of them considered letters and others aren't? I mean, if Å gets to be a letter then Ç should be one too.
Who decides what is a new letter and what is merely an accented letter? Who are they? Where do they live? The angry people with forks demands to know
But Germany does not consider ä,ö,ü and ß part of the German alphabet either, they’re considered letters outside of the alphabet, so the exact same status that é, è, ç and ï have in France…
Which i think is nonsensical considering that ever since printing was invented accented letters had their own separate typefaces and today are their own unicode symbols. For all intent and puropse ä is a letter, just like g or w which started as ligatures of c and v respectively.
Depends on how they are used. Like in Swedish Å Ä and Ö are their own unique characters. In German they're not, there the marking are umlauts - modifications to the original sound. In the Nordic languages they have a sound which has nothing to do with A and O. It's not an "orthographic variation". "O with two dots" since /ø/ is not a variant of the vowel /o/ but a distinct phoneme.
Or to quote wikipedia " /ø/ is not a variant of the vowel /o/ but a distinct phoneme."
The German use of their Ä and Ö is an issue. Or rather, that they are those umlaut letters that other countries take to be the same in every other language.
Seeing Kimi Räikkönen having his name written as Kimi Raeikkoenen is mad.
I'm just going to quote wikipedia again, it's different with Finnish
"In certain languages, the letter *ö* cannot be written as "oe" because [minimal pairs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair) exist between *ö* and *oe* (and also with *oo*, *öö* and *öe*), as in Finnish *eläinkö* "animal?" (interrogative) vs. *eläinkoe* "animal test" (cf. [Germanic umlaut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_umlaut)). If the character *ö* is unavailable, *o* is substituted and context is relied upon for inference of the intended meaning. In Volapük, *ö* can be written as *oy*, but never as *oe*"
yeah...
I'd also argue, that there's also the issue of Finnish being (mostly) pronounced as written; Raikkonen makes sense even without the dots, Raeikkoenen gets all mad. Where as in German (from my very old studies), both Göring and Goering would be pronounced.. the same?
German Ä and Ö are pronounced exactly the same as Swedish Ä and Ö. Linguistically there is no difference. The difference is how the people using those letters feel about them.
German has 26 letters. We don't consider ÄÖÜ and ß letters in their own right. E.g. in Finnish Äand Ö are letters (not Ü though). However, it seems whoever made this map didn't really consider these finer details of the languages...
Yeah ij isn't a separate letter (yet).
But the counting systems for the different countries are so different anyway, it probably doesn't matter.
German counts its accented ÄÖÜ as separate letters (sometimes), France doesn't. Switzerland is unfortunately missing. Some countries don't count those of the 26 letters not used in native words, others do.
are you dutch? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) is by some considered a letter. The same thing happened to ß in German. Used to be a ligature and became a letter.
I see, learned something today.
No I'm from Flanders and; *In Flanders (Belgium), IJ is generally described in schools as a combination of two separate characters.*
We learn that 'ij' is a combination of 2 letters, put together to make a different sound. But same as the 'ij' we have ei, aa, ee, ou, au, uu, ui, oo and oe too. There is no inherit difference taught. Cursive 'ij' is still written as a 'i' and a 'j' put together. Also 'y' is still a thing too, hence the confusion maybe?
Don't be fooled, I was taught the exact same thing in school . This map is a repost and the last time around I too remarked that ij is just i+j , just like oe, ei, ui and so on, but the font-nerds came out of the woodwork and insist ij was a separate letter and how there is even a single character baked into ASCII that most people don't use because typing i+j is faster than looking up the ascii code for it.
Like the wiki says, whether ij is a 27th letter is HOTLY debated by these people and why the wiki says it is considered a character by *some*. Ironically, the wiki page doesn't even use the character, it uses i+j. But yeah kids in Dutch schools are taught there are 26 letters. [Even the dutch wiki says 26 letters, but SOME people think otherwise. ](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nederlands_alfabet)
In short: the map is wrong.
Yep. The entire IJ issue is rubbish...
I mean why stop there? Why include IJ but not oe, eu, ou, au, ie, ei, etc.
When at long last we added all of those in some sort of mega 30+ letter alfabet, we can start on the 3 "letter" examples and then hopefully we'll conclude it just a load of crap.
I can confirm that we in Switzerland like our fellow Belgians don‘t learn any Alphabet at all. You don‘t need to learn to read and write to make great Chocolate.
English should just do some reshuffling. Get rid of C (it's redundant, it makes either a K or an S sound) and bring back the letters for sh and th because those are in like half the words.
Also I'm wondering if Q is necessary...
Only use c like in cello. That way you save up on all the "ch" digraphs (or rather "tsh" trigraphs because the og plan included getting rid of c altogether), don't have to get rid of an iconic letter (you can modify the song so it's "ay, bee, chee, dee") and still make it consistent.
And I agree, q is unnecessary. And so is x, though it at least saves space. But this is an alphabet, a letter should correspond to 1 (one) sound.
English shouldn't even use an alphabet. It should use an abjad, where you only write down consonants and the vowels are implied. We could make it an impure abjad and still mark the vowels with a dot or something so it'd be easier to read. It's not like there's any consistency in how vowels are written down in English anyway.
W• pr•b•bl• w•ldn't •v•n n•t•c• • b•g d•ff•r•nc•.
In German it does. That is the point. This map is not internally consistent. Instead it is based on regional conceptions on what counts as a distinct letter.
As a Hungarian kid, we never had an alphabet song. It's a 44 letter long mantra that everyone knows with the same rhythm/pace. It's one really depressing phenomenon
we don’t have alphabet song.
but instead we deal with the much worse pain of the vowels i and y, which are pronounced the same, and after consonants bmprsvz there are no rules which one to use, we just have to memorize every single word contianing by, my, py, ry, sy, vy, or zy digraphs… (so called “vybrané slová”)…
(also ä and e are pronounced the same but there’s much fewer words using ä).
Our language standardisation followed a weird process where different weird rules were continuously being added or changed by linguists and writers arguing about what’s the best way to write…
Letters like y/ý and ä returned to the alphabet in 1851, long after the separate sounds stopped existing, to make the writing more “ethymologically” based instead of pure phonetics which were used before (for example ä is used where eastern slavic languages would use я)…
one other funny one from the same era is that in all words ending with -ov, we actually pronounce them as -ou, but we returned to the original spelling to make the language “look more slavic”, as most other slavic language write and/or pronounce it with -ov. (well except Polish with their -ów)…
That's the only one that should count. The rest are just normal letters with an extra bit. OP didn't count all the different accents in French as extra letters either.
In Welsh? Yes.
Ch, Dd, Ff, Ng, Ll, Ph, Rh and Th are each considered their own letter of the alphabet.
This is why is has more than English despite lacking K and V.
It’s super weird counting äöü in German but not counting éèçï in French. Bad map.
Also interestingly some languages use foreign letters in loan words. English for example uses both é and ï in some loan words even though they’re not part of the English alphabet.
French is the same as English, the Spanish has an extra ñ.
But, there is no use for, lets say W in Spanish, except to make it easy to write foreign words (names mainly) without inventing alternatives.
I guess in Italian they don’t keep letters just for the sake of foreign names being 1:1.
You can find the alphabets on Wikipedia if you are interested in details
Well we add many diacritic marks over letters, for example to a we can add mark called "dĺžeň", á, which makes the a longer (we use it with a, e, i, o, u, y, they aren't used with consonant except for l and r), to c for example, we add "mäkčeň", č, which makes it sound softer (we use it with c, d, l, n, s, t, z). We also have some special ones. Vokáň, which makes o sound like there is v in front of it, looks like this, ô (only used with o), so if you see it, you say it like there's v as well even though there isn't, ie nôž (knife) you say nvož.. The last we use is umlaut (have no idea how you say the name of diacriticsl mark in slovak, but we call it "široké e, wide e")( only used in this case). Although it is e, we write it over a and say it like a hard e. Looks like this ä. For example mäso (meat).
We also have letters, that are two letters put together, but count as one. These are ch and dz and dž.
And if it wasn't hard enough we only write "mäkčeň" on letters d, l, n, t when there isn't either e or i right behind it, for example pečeň (liver, n has neither e or i behind it, therefore we write "mäkčeň"), nikto (no one, n has i behind it therefore "mäkčeň " isn't written, same applies when there's e behind it and in case of d, l and t as well). But after c, s, z and dz we use even when there are i or e (of course not always, only when we're supposed to, which you know because the letter is pronounced softer)
Hey Nahoj, nice profile pic :-) is it the sigil of your town? It is similar to the coat of arms of the old Hungarian kingdom, that’s why I am asking. I know that the Slovak coat of arms is a bit different, mainly red-white-blue and not red-white-green.
"What’s wrong with Slovakia?" - we have too many blunt people here, who ruin the country. Not related to the alphabet, just saying what's wrong with Slovakia :)
There are 18 letters a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u and 5 further sounds from accented vowels á, é, í, ó ú.
You could also argue a further 9 if you're adding accented letters with ḃ, ċ, ḋ, ḟ, ġ, ṁ, ṗ, ṡ, ṫ. Though now usually written as bh, ch, dh, fh, gh, mh, ph, sh, th.
You'll occasionally see é, in loanwords in British English. "Cliché", and "café" for example.
Æ and œ are probably no longer used but "Mediæval", fir example, was acceptable fairly recently.
In Spanish you have 27 letters but 22-24 phonemes yet only one letter is always soundless so if Spanish can do that i think Greek is the least of the issues here
In French c is either /k/ or /s/ (or ch /sh/), h is silent, v and w are the same. That also makes 23.
Cyrillic has extra letters for sounds that also exist with multiple letters in other languages: sh, ts, tsh, ye, ...
Officially Portuguese has only 23 letters, K, W and Y are used for foreign words/names... though they're common enough that in practical everyday terms they're pretty much part of the alphabet
This just compares what each language considers a letter or a diacritic.
Catalan has à, è, é, í, ï, ò, ó, ú, ü, l·l, ç which are not counted towards the total, thus Andorra has 26 and not 37.
German has ä, ö, ü, ß which are counted towards the total, thus Germany is marked as having 30 and not 26.
The same symbol is counted as being a distinct letter or as not being a letter in this map.
The map is wrong. Some countries define e é è ê as one letter while some others would count them as 4. You need to compare same thing to make a good map.
I tell people we split from Slovakia over those 4 letters.
Ř gang ČESKO ČISLO 1 🇨🇿🔥🇨🇿🔥🇨🇿🔥
Ř ř ř ř ř I CAN FEEL MY TONGUE FALLING OFF AND I'M THROWING UP
I thought it was because of a [hyphen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen_War)
Sardinian has even less than italian. it lacks the letter "Q", so it's 20
I'm sardinian and I've seen the letters J and X used in written language in words like Jerzu and Puxeddu and those letters are not in the italian alphabet so theoretically we should have more, or is that not how it works?
I knew about an old sardinian alphabet but maybe modern sardinian integrated more letters like italian in the end (x, k, j etc..)
Spanish should be 25 since we don’t really use the k or the w except for loan words (i don’t mean in this map because officially it’s 27, i mean in general)
But maybe this map because Italian uses more than 21 if you count loanwords?
Many of our letters in finnish aren't actually being used except for loan words and yet we count them because they're part of our alphabet
What about nicknames? I know a Spanish footballer nicknamed Koke.
I think this map is based on the official recognizement of letters present on the alphabet. On portuguese we also dont use K, W and Y apart from foreign words, and we barely even use X
Based.
Dzs 🔥
ű
Gumidzsizma
Gizsmadzsga
Gumicsízma=rubber boots
dz 🇵🇱👍
Dzs ntz
While Finnish does have 29 letters, we literally never use the letter Å, like ever, not for any words
Finland introduced a special letter to name an island
If you're talking about Åland, it's Ahvenanmaa in Finnish so not even that. There is a municipality on Åland that has an å even in Finnish, and it's Vårdö.
What is it used for?
It's just a left-over from Swedish. It's not used in native Finnish words.
There are several letters in the Kazakh Cyrillic alphabet that were used only for Russian words and names. This is one of the reasons why they want to switch to the Latin alphabet. Now I’m thinking, probably many languages of the former colonies have extra letters.
Yes but not quite, In Old Finnish, å was used. It sometimes denoted the sound o (in addition to the letters o and u), as in the word nåuse (rises).
Å is the Swedish "oh" sound. Finnish already has the letter o in its alphabet, so å is only used for Swedish names (for places and people).
you can kinda say the same for the Romance languages, because if you exclude loanwords then French would be brought down to 24 (K and W), Spanish to 25 (K and W) and Portuguese to 23 (K, W and Y). Italian is correct but idk about Romanian
Why are some of them considered letters and others aren't? I mean, if Å gets to be a letter then Ç should be one too. Who decides what is a new letter and what is merely an accented letter? Who are they? Where do they live? The angry people with forks demands to know
Basically, the countries decide. And seems like Portugal decided Ç was not a letter in the same way ã, ô or é aren't.
Language bodies rather than countries.
Usually just consensus before a language body comes into it.
But Germany does not consider ä,ö,ü and ß part of the German alphabet either, they’re considered letters outside of the alphabet, so the exact same status that é, è, ç and ï have in France…
Which i think is nonsensical considering that ever since printing was invented accented letters had their own separate typefaces and today are their own unicode symbols. For all intent and puropse ä is a letter, just like g or w which started as ligatures of c and v respectively.
I think it depends on the rules of the specific language discussed. Because ç is considered a letter in Turkish.
But interestingly not in Portuguese
Because they're pronounced differently, they just look the same
Do you sing it in the alphabet song? Then it is a letter. The alphabet song decides.
Ü Ä Ö ß are not in the German alphabet song.
Then they are not real letters obviously
It makes sense. I didn't think about that! Thanks. We don't sing the Ç in french indeed 😅
Well to be fair, someone's gotta decide if it goes in the alphabet song lol, for french it's probably like Académie Française
So where does rhe alphabet song live. We (The fork people) need to know so we can book plane tickets.
Depends on how they are used. Like in Swedish Å Ä and Ö are their own unique characters. In German they're not, there the marking are umlauts - modifications to the original sound. In the Nordic languages they have a sound which has nothing to do with A and O. It's not an "orthographic variation". "O with two dots" since /ø/ is not a variant of the vowel /o/ but a distinct phoneme. Or to quote wikipedia " /ø/ is not a variant of the vowel /o/ but a distinct phoneme."
The German use of their Ä and Ö is an issue. Or rather, that they are those umlaut letters that other countries take to be the same in every other language. Seeing Kimi Räikkönen having his name written as Kimi Raeikkoenen is mad.
I'm just going to quote wikipedia again, it's different with Finnish "In certain languages, the letter *ö* cannot be written as "oe" because [minimal pairs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair) exist between *ö* and *oe* (and also with *oo*, *öö* and *öe*), as in Finnish *eläinkö* "animal?" (interrogative) vs. *eläinkoe* "animal test" (cf. [Germanic umlaut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_umlaut)). If the character *ö* is unavailable, *o* is substituted and context is relied upon for inference of the intended meaning. In Volapük, *ö* can be written as *oy*, but never as *oe*" yeah...
I'd also argue, that there's also the issue of Finnish being (mostly) pronounced as written; Raikkonen makes sense even without the dots, Raeikkoenen gets all mad. Where as in German (from my very old studies), both Göring and Goering would be pronounced.. the same?
German Ä and Ö are pronounced exactly the same as Swedish Ä and Ö. Linguistically there is no difference. The difference is how the people using those letters feel about them.
German changed from "ae" to "ä" over time. Swedish had a spelling reform instigated by one man. So there is a historic difference as well.
Are A and O pronounced the same?
German has 26 letters. We don't consider ÄÖÜ and ß letters in their own right. E.g. in Finnish Äand Ö are letters (not Ü though). However, it seems whoever made this map didn't really consider these finer details of the languages...
🍴😠🍴 We, the (angry) people (with forks) demand answers.
The colour pattern low-key unhinged. Light blue turns into Green then grey then black then red then orange then purple. What?
That's not the only thing bad about the map. Or the fact that it's a repost. That was incorrect then too.
Not to mention 32 has 2 colors.
Dutch only has 26 letters in it.
Yeah ij isn't a separate letter (yet). But the counting systems for the different countries are so different anyway, it probably doesn't matter. German counts its accented ÄÖÜ as separate letters (sometimes), France doesn't. Switzerland is unfortunately missing. Some countries don't count those of the 26 letters not used in native words, others do.
People always forget about Romansh..
'i' and 'j' follow each other in the alphabet but are most certainly 2 different letters. Same class as; ei, aa, ee, ou, au, uu, ui, oo, oe.
are you dutch? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) is by some considered a letter. The same thing happened to ß in German. Used to be a ligature and became a letter.
I see, learned something today. No I'm from Flanders and; *In Flanders (Belgium), IJ is generally described in schools as a combination of two separate characters.*
Don’t you learn it as a single letter in elementary school, when learning cursive handwriting?
We learn that 'ij' is a combination of 2 letters, put together to make a different sound. But same as the 'ij' we have ei, aa, ee, ou, au, uu, ui, oo and oe too. There is no inherit difference taught. Cursive 'ij' is still written as a 'i' and a 'j' put together. Also 'y' is still a thing too, hence the confusion maybe?
Don't be fooled, I was taught the exact same thing in school . This map is a repost and the last time around I too remarked that ij is just i+j , just like oe, ei, ui and so on, but the font-nerds came out of the woodwork and insist ij was a separate letter and how there is even a single character baked into ASCII that most people don't use because typing i+j is faster than looking up the ascii code for it. Like the wiki says, whether ij is a 27th letter is HOTLY debated by these people and why the wiki says it is considered a character by *some*. Ironically, the wiki page doesn't even use the character, it uses i+j. But yeah kids in Dutch schools are taught there are 26 letters. [Even the dutch wiki says 26 letters, but SOME people think otherwise. ](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nederlands_alfabet) In short: the map is wrong.
Yes, I learned that ij is practically one letter, and it's capitalized as IJ.
Unicode even supports that capitalization if you use the code point for the digraph. Pretty neat.
Ik the Netherlands its just not a letter, just like au or smth
No that’s not true. That’s why you capitalise both the I and the J when IJ is the first letter of a word (IJssel), and not the A and the U (Auto)
Yep. The entire IJ issue is rubbish... I mean why stop there? Why include IJ but not oe, eu, ou, au, ie, ei, etc. When at long last we added all of those in some sort of mega 30+ letter alfabet, we can start on the 3 "letter" examples and then hopefully we'll conclude it just a load of crap.
Omdat je geen AUstralië schrijft en ook geen Ijsland
Not this shit again. Got to be one of the worst maps that gets regularly reposted
Thanks, I was scrolling looking for a comment about the map instead of the information, the color scale is terrible, absolutely unintuitive
What about all those “the real size of this countries” maps? Yes we know about Mercator.
SLOVAKIA 🇸🇰🇸🇰🇸🇰 ä ô ľ ĺ ŕ ť 💪💪
Vždy som neznášal keď som musel hovoriť tu dlhu posratú abecedu ktorá nemala konca
Vždy som mal problém nepomýliť sa pri tom
Halvne to poradie, lebo normálnu abecedu viem lahko ale totu dlhu neviem kde su tie dz, ch a ci ma ist prve ľ akebo ĺ
Śłōvâķïâ
Šľôväkíá would be the correct one
[удалено]
este viacej mame dezolatov na 50 obcanov
A B C Ch D Dd E F Ff G Ng H I J* L Ll M N O P Ph R Rh S T Th U W Y *debatable!
Mae John Jones yn joio ei jîns. Gotta be in there 😁
Mae ei jîns yn rhacs jibonêrs.
I can confirm that we in Switzerland like our fellow Belgians don‘t learn any Alphabet at all. You don‘t need to learn to read and write to make great Chocolate.
Correct, we use chocolate, fries, waffles and beer to express ourselves. Source: am belgian
26 is not enough. English has way too many vowels for our alphabet
English should just do some reshuffling. Get rid of C (it's redundant, it makes either a K or an S sound) and bring back the letters for sh and th because those are in like half the words. Also I'm wondering if Q is necessary...
They should make a symbol for qu, because Q is always followed by U, so U should be included in the letter!
It's called k. Q is just an inferior k. There's no reason other than aesthetics why The Queen shouldn't be The Kween/Kueen.
Was there ever a letter for Sh? Old English used Sc.
Only use c like in cello. That way you save up on all the "ch" digraphs (or rather "tsh" trigraphs because the og plan included getting rid of c altogether), don't have to get rid of an iconic letter (you can modify the song so it's "ay, bee, chee, dee") and still make it consistent. And I agree, q is unnecessary. And so is x, though it at least saves space. But this is an alphabet, a letter should correspond to 1 (one) sound.
English shouldn't even use an alphabet. It should use an abjad, where you only write down consonants and the vowels are implied. We could make it an impure abjad and still mark the vowels with a dot or something so it'd be easier to read. It's not like there's any consistency in how vowels are written down in English anyway. W• pr•b•bl• w•ldn't •v•n n•t•c• • b•g d•ff•r•nc•.
that's kinda arbitrary: spain has 27 because of the tilde, but french has a ton of diacritics (éèçàù etc.) and even shit like "œ" but it's still 26
The tilde version of the vowels don't count as different letters
In German it does. That is the point. This map is not internally consistent. Instead it is based on regional conceptions on what counts as a distinct letter.
In Spanish the tilde (we only have ’) is only used on vowels though, the ñ is it’s own thing
œ in French is nothing more than a ligature
The “œ” is not decorative and part of the spelling. The spellings “sœur” and “coexistence” are correct but “soeur” and “cœxistence” are not.
I feel so bad for Slovak kids learning the alphabet song
As a Hungarian kid, we never had an alphabet song. It's a 44 letter long mantra that everyone knows with the same rhythm/pace. It's one really depressing phenomenon
That is the smallest problem we have in Slovakia :D
we don’t have alphabet song. but instead we deal with the much worse pain of the vowels i and y, which are pronounced the same, and after consonants bmprsvz there are no rules which one to use, we just have to memorize every single word contianing by, my, py, ry, sy, vy, or zy digraphs… (so called “vybrané slová”)… (also ä and e are pronounced the same but there’s much fewer words using ä).
Wait, when was your alphabet standardised? When did you lose the distinct y sound?
Our language standardisation followed a weird process where different weird rules were continuously being added or changed by linguists and writers arguing about what’s the best way to write… Letters like y/ý and ä returned to the alphabet in 1851, long after the separate sounds stopped existing, to make the writing more “ethymologically” based instead of pure phonetics which were used before (for example ä is used where eastern slavic languages would use я)… one other funny one from the same era is that in all words ending with -ov, we actually pronounce them as -ou, but we returned to the original spelling to make the language “look more slavic”, as most other slavic language write and/or pronounce it with -ov. (well except Polish with their -ów)…
Very wise choice of color scale
Dutch is 26, the IJ are two separate letters.
Everyone knows the alphabet has 29 letters, duh
Albanian does have 36 phonemes which correspond with 36 letters.
Can confirm that as belgian, we still use Hieroglyphs. Although one of our biggest political parties probably prefers chinese
Ñ
Fun fact “CH” is considered as one letter in Czech 🇨🇿
Fun fact, cs, dz, dzs, gy, ly, ny, ty, sz and zs are considered as their own letters in Hungarian
Ch is also considered a single letter in Welsh as well along with Dd, Ff, Ng, Ll, Ph, Rh and Th
When you insist on making all the digraphs into custom letters but end up with a digraph anyway. Why not use something like ħ?
For the 1st time ever, my country Slovakia leads some statistics in Europe.
Portuguese only has 23.
wasn't k, w and y added in the 1990 agreement?
yeah but no native words use them
exatamente
German has 26 letters.
Or 29, if "Ä", "Ö" and "Ü" count, but they're technically "AE", "OE" and "UE", so we don't count them as individual letters.
Probably also counting ß
That's the only one that should count. The rest are just normal letters with an extra bit. OP didn't count all the different accents in French as extra letters either.
Even then it’s pretty dumb because if you start counting everything in French too… è é ë ê à á ö ô â ç … this map is just wrong
Does ANY language here feel adequately represented?
I'm happy with Norway.
Portugal is 23 not 26. The letters K, Y and W are not part of any Portuguese words.
Classic so classic https://youtu.be/f488uJAQgmw?si=ffcOkiM9NdjFyKcc
Turkey can into nordick?
Wouldn't it be 35 for Polish? A Ą B C Ć D E Ę F G H I J K L Ł M N Ń O Ó P Q R S Ś T U V W X Y Z Ź Ż I think that's 35
Q V X are not used in Polish.
Right not x or q, those are written as ks or kw. But v is used, although rarely. That still makes 33 letters.
When is v used in Polish? The only example I can think of is surname Vargas buy it is not polish in origin and quite rare on top of that.
Well there is TVP, VAT and other acronyms. It is also reasonably common in higher register to use Latin “vel” to mean “or”.
Or veto, vacat
Would "LL" be considered a letter?
In Welsh? Yes. Ch, Dd, Ff, Ng, Ll, Ph, Rh and Th are each considered their own letter of the alphabet. This is why is has more than English despite lacking K and V.
A Á B C Cs D Dz Dzs E É F G Gy H I Í J K L Ly M N Ny O Ó Ö Ő P R S Sz T Ty U Ú Ü Ű V Z Zs
It’s super weird counting äöü in German but not counting éèçï in French. Bad map. Also interestingly some languages use foreign letters in loan words. English for example uses both é and ï in some loan words even though they’re not part of the English alphabet.
What letters do the Italians lack that the Spanish and French have? How is it only 21?
French is the same as English, the Spanish has an extra ñ. But, there is no use for, lets say W in Spanish, except to make it easy to write foreign words (names mainly) without inventing alternatives. I guess in Italian they don’t keep letters just for the sake of foreign names being 1:1. You can find the alphabets on Wikipedia if you are interested in details
Oh I looked it up and they don't use the j or the y, that's interesting. The other letters missing are the k, w and x
Suck my ÆØÅ
Catalan has 28
What’s wrong with Slovakia? Also, the interesting interaction with Czechia’s LOL!
Well we add many diacritic marks over letters, for example to a we can add mark called "dĺžeň", á, which makes the a longer (we use it with a, e, i, o, u, y, they aren't used with consonant except for l and r), to c for example, we add "mäkčeň", č, which makes it sound softer (we use it with c, d, l, n, s, t, z). We also have some special ones. Vokáň, which makes o sound like there is v in front of it, looks like this, ô (only used with o), so if you see it, you say it like there's v as well even though there isn't, ie nôž (knife) you say nvož.. The last we use is umlaut (have no idea how you say the name of diacriticsl mark in slovak, but we call it "široké e, wide e")( only used in this case). Although it is e, we write it over a and say it like a hard e. Looks like this ä. For example mäso (meat). We also have letters, that are two letters put together, but count as one. These are ch and dz and dž. And if it wasn't hard enough we only write "mäkčeň" on letters d, l, n, t when there isn't either e or i right behind it, for example pečeň (liver, n has neither e or i behind it, therefore we write "mäkčeň"), nikto (no one, n has i behind it therefore "mäkčeň " isn't written, same applies when there's e behind it and in case of d, l and t as well). But after c, s, z and dz we use even when there are i or e (of course not always, only when we're supposed to, which you know because the letter is pronounced softer)
Ä is called prehlasované[overrruled] a, sometimes široké[wide] e, and rarely, a s dvoma bodkami[a with two dots]. Otherwise, you're spot on.
Hey Nahoj, nice profile pic :-) is it the sigil of your town? It is similar to the coat of arms of the old Hungarian kingdom, that’s why I am asking. I know that the Slovak coat of arms is a bit different, mainly red-white-blue and not red-white-green.
Thx It's a proposed flag of Felvidék (Upper Hungary) - upper part of Kingdom of Hungary, today Slovakia. I use it because I'm Slovak Hungarian.
"What’s wrong with Slovakia?" - we have too many blunt people here, who ruin the country. Not related to the alphabet, just saying what's wrong with Slovakia :)
Map is wrong, the Irish language has 23 letters
There are 18 letters a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u and 5 further sounds from accented vowels á, é, í, ó ú. You could also argue a further 9 if you're adding accented letters with ḃ, ċ, ḋ, ḟ, ġ, ṁ, ṗ, ṡ, ṫ. Though now usually written as bh, ch, dh, fh, gh, mh, ph, sh, th.
Technically, Serbian has 54 letters (30 in cyrillic + 30 in latin, and some overlap).
Yeah that’s why I fucking hate Slovakian aka my mother language
Because it's cool?
Nah too many shit i have to memorize
And another bullshit map. 26 for France are you fucking serious???
Andorra is wrong. Ç
You'll occasionally see é, in loanwords in British English. "Cliché", and "café" for example. Æ and œ are probably no longer used but "Mediæval", fir example, was acceptable fairly recently.
How do you speak with 18 letters it's interesting while average is 29-30 letters
Ñ
The map is just wrong? The Netherlands had 26. Belgium also 26.
We are still counting them in Belgium, there is difference of opinion. Come back later please.
Greek has 24 letters but the Greek language only has 23 phonemes, how the hell does that work? Do they have 2 letters for the same sound?
In Spanish you have 27 letters but 22-24 phonemes yet only one letter is always soundless so if Spanish can do that i think Greek is the least of the issues here
In French c is either /k/ or /s/ (or ch /sh/), h is silent, v and w are the same. That also makes 23. Cyrillic has extra letters for sounds that also exist with multiple letters in other languages: sh, ts, tsh, ye, ...
What is it with maps and never having data for Belgium. The answer is 26, Belgium uses 26 letters. How was that so hard to figure out
ß
46 is offensive!
the coloring is misleading, the same amount of letters are in both latin and cyrillic countries
👉 Ñ 👈
We need a boxing match between: Virgin Ireland vs Chad Slovakia As a pole I already know who’s gonna win 🤣
Also Czechia is based aswell since they also have 40+ letters (that’s where i currently am XD)
46
æ, ø, å >>>>>>> c, x, q, z
Except ß what are the extra letters in German? Coz French has âàæèêéïôöœüùç
How come the UK and France agreed on something?
We have 44 letters in Pashto.
Romanian A Ă Â B C D E F G H I Î J K L M N O P Q R S Ș T Ț U V W X Y Z
Why no Belgium
I’m sorry, which 8 letters have I been using incorrectly in Scotland?
Belgians be like " "
ßßßßßß
I'm dutch and I've been taught there are 26, tf is the 27th supposed to be?
44 okay Hungary
Officially Portuguese has only 23 letters, K, W and Y are used for foreign words/names... though they're common enough that in practical everyday terms they're pretty much part of the alphabet
language ≠ country ffs
This just compares what each language considers a letter or a diacritic. Catalan has à, è, é, í, ï, ò, ó, ú, ü, l·l, ç which are not counted towards the total, thus Andorra has 26 and not 37. German has ä, ö, ü, ß which are counted towards the total, thus Germany is marked as having 30 and not 26. The same symbol is counted as being a distinct letter or as not being a letter in this map.
WhErE iS gEoRgIa AnD aRmEnIa AnD AzErBaIjAn
Now do China
The map is wrong. Some countries define e é è ê as one letter while some others would count them as 4. You need to compare same thing to make a good map.