Latvian orthography

The modern Latvian orthography is based on Latin script adapted to phonetic principles, following the pronunciation of the language.

These marked letters, Č, Š and Ž are pronounced [tʃ], [ʃ] and [ʒ] respectively.

The letters Ģ, Ķ, Ļ and Ņ are written with a cedilla or a small comma placed below (or, in the case of the lowercase g, above).

The last of these stood for the palatalized dental trill /rʲ/ which is still used in some dialects (mainly outside Latvia) but not in the standard language, and hence the letter Ŗ was finally removed from the alphabet on 5 June 1946, when the Latvian SSR legislature passed a regulation that officially replaced it with R in print.

[9] The letters CH, Ō and Ŗ continue to be used in print throughout most of the Latvian diaspora communities, whose founding members left their homeland before the post-World War II Soviet-era language reforms.

An example of a publication in Latvia today, albeit one aimed at the Latvian diaspora, that uses the older orthography—including the letters CH, Ō and Ŗ—is the weekly newspaper Brīvā Latvija.

[10] This has given rise to at least half a dozen lawsuits over the last couple decades, mostly ethnic Russian Latvian nationals not content with addition of case endings.

They are replaced by "k(v)/h", "v", "ks", and "i"/"j" respectively (e.g. nikābs, kvarcs, kvarks, hidrohinons, viskijs, vindsērfs, vafele, ekstra, oksimorons, eksosfēra, jeti, joga, itrijs, etc.)

However, they are used in international symbols, such as: Despite this, these letters are not used in Latvian for writing foreign personal and geographical names; instead they are adapted to Latvian phonology, orthography, and morphology, e. g. Džordžs Volkers Bušs (George Walker Bush), but brand names are often written in their original spelling (e.g. Pixar).

One or two threads of differently colored yarn would be tied in knots and wound onto a peg, which created a ball that was unraveled to read the full message.

Standard QWERTY computer keyboards are used for writing in Latvian; diacritics are entered by using a dead key (usually ' or `).