Akson Lao is a sister system to the Thai script, with which it shares many similarities and roots.

In the 1960s, the Lao People's Revolutionary Party has simplified the spelling to be phonemic and omitted extra letters used to write words of Pali-Sanskrit origin.

[5] The twenty-seven consonants of the Lao alphabet are divided into three tone classes—high (ສູງ [sǔːŋ]), middle (ກາງ [kàːŋ]), and low (ຕ່ຳ [tām])—which determine the tonal pronunciation of the word in conjunction with the four tone marks and distinctions between short and long vowels.

It was dropped as part of a language reform because most speakers pronounced it as "l", and had an ambiguous status for several decades.

[6] A comprehensive dictionary published by a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Information and Culture did not include it.

[7] However, as the Lao vocabulary began to incorporate more foreign names (such as Europe, Australia, and America) it filled a need and is now taught in schools.

Lao also uses digraphs based on combinations of the silent (unpronounced) ຫ ຫ່ານ with certain other consonants, some of which also have special ligature forms that are optionally used.

This also explains why the Lao script reserved consonants with the same sounds (e.g. ຂ and ຄ /kʰ/, ສ and ຊ /s/).

The older versions of the script also included special forms for combinations of ພ (pʰ) + ຍ (ɲ), ສ (s) + ນ (n), and ມ (m) + ລ (l).

[12] Lao characters in initial position (several letters appearing in the same box have identical pronunciation).

In its earlier form, Lao would be considered a full abugida, in which the inherent vowel is embedded in the consonant letters.

[16] Although a dotted circle ◌ is used on this page to represent the consonant, in standard Lao orthography a small x symbol is used for this purpose.

[8] Traditionally this was a simple, stylized, sans-serif x and it was included in Lao fonts before Unicode became widespread.

Unicode does not make it available as part of the Lao alphabet set, and a lower-case sans-serif x is often used instead.

The Laos Ministry of Post and Telecommunications asked local technicians to develop a software system of international standard that would enable the Phetsarath OT font to be like other font systems that local users could access.

For additional details, see the Thai script page's sections for the alphabetic table and usage for Sanskrit and Pali.