A Georgian alphabet primer: thirty-three letters, three scripts

Thirty-three letters, one sound each

Mkhedruli is the script on every shop front, menu and destination board in the country: thirty-three letters in modern use, no capital letters in ordinary text, and an almost perfect one-to-one fit between letter and sound. Learn what a letter says and it says the same thing in every word you meet afterwards.

It looks like nothing else. The forms are rounded and looped, they sit on a baseline with ascenders and descenders much like a Latin lowercase, and they are not borrowed from Greek, Cyrillic or Arabic. Georgian belongs to the Kartvelian family, related to Mingrelian, Svan and Laz, and to nothing beyond the Caucasus.

UNESCO added the living culture of the three Georgian writing systems to its intangible heritage list in 2016, and the wording matters: all three are still in use. Asomtavruli on icons, Nuskhuri in church manuscripts, Mkhedruli everywhere else, including the logo of the bank on the corner.

You can travel Georgia perfectly well without reading a word of it. Most people under forty in Tbilisi have some English, main-road signs are bilingual, and the food arrives either way. But an hour with the letters pays for itself the first morning you stand in front of the destination boards at Didube.

Three scripts, and all three are still alive

The oldest is Asomtavruli, rounded capitals known from fifth-century inscriptions — the Bir el Qutt fragments in the Judaean desert and the church at Bolnisi south of Tbilisi. Around the ninth century a narrower, angular minuscule called Nuskhuri appeared for manuscripts; together the two are known as Khutsuri, the priestly script.

Mkhedruli, the secular hand, shows up around the tenth century and takes over civil writing across the next three hundred years. That is the one you will read. Its all-caps styling, Mtavruli, is what road signs, headlines and shop fronts use, and the shapes differ enough to catch a beginner out.

Ten letters that open most boards

The whole alphabet takes an evening. Ten letters take twenty minutes and get you most of the way through a destination board, because Georgian place names are short, repetitive, and nearly always end in the same vowel.

Start with the endings. Almost every Georgian noun and place name in its plain form ends in ი, a simple i: თბილისი, ბათუმი, ქუთაისი, გორი. Once you can spot that tail you are already reading the last letter of half the words in front of you.

The same town, spelled three ways

Latin transliteration of Georgian has never settled in practice. The hill town in Kakheti turns up as Sighnaghi, Signagi and Sighnagi on road signs, bus tickets and booking sites, sometimes inside the same kilometre. Mtskheta, Kutaisi and Zugdidi are stable enough; anything containing ღ, ყ or ჭ is a lottery.

Names change as well as spellings. The village under Mount Kazbek has officially been Stepantsminda since 2007, and almost everyone still says Kazbegi, including the drivers at Didube and the card in the windscreen. Both will get you on the same bus.

The fix is the Georgian spelling, because that one does not move. Photograph the Mkhedruli form of wherever you are heading and match shapes rather than sounds. Six recognised letters on a handwritten card beat a perfect transliteration that appears nowhere on the vehicle.

The sounds English does not have

Georgian distinguishes aspirated and ejective consonants, and English has only the first kind. თ, ქ and ფ are roughly the t, k and p of top, cat and pot. Their partners ტ, კ and პ are ejectives, made with the throat closed so the air is pushed out by the larynx: sharp, clipped and hard.

Two others are worth attempting because they are so common in place names. ღ is a soft gargle at the back of the mouth, close to a French r, and it sits in Sighnaghi and in ღვინო, wine. ყ is deeper still and ejective, and it is the sound in Kazbegi that nobody gets on the first try.

Enough letters to read a menu

Menus in central Tbilisi are usually bilingual. Menus in a village guesthouse, a bakery, or a roadside kitchen on the Military Highway often are not. Six words cover most of what you actually want to order, and they repeat from Batumi to Omalo.

The pattern is worth noticing: Georgian writes what it says, so once you have sounded out ხ-ი-ნ-კ-ა-ლ-ი you have the word, with no silent letters and no vowel shifts to guess at. It is a slow read rather than a hard one, and it speeds up within days.

Road signs, and the capitals nobody taught you

Sign painters use Mtavruli, the all-caps styling of Mkhedruli, and the letters change shape enough to undo an hour of study. Descenders straighten, loops flatten, everything squares up to a single height. Learn the capital form of your ten letters alongside the lowercase and the problem quietly disappears.

On the main highways — the road north to Kazbegi, the coast road to Batumi, the Tbilisi–Kutaisi motorway — signs are bilingual, Georgian above and Latin below. Off them they often are not, and the handwritten cards propped in marshrutka windscreens never are.

An hour, a pen and a station board

The realistic goal is recognition, not writing. You want to look at a card wedged in a windscreen and know whether it says Kazbegi. That is an hour with a pen in a café, followed by a week of noticing letters on shop fronts as you walk.

Tbilisi is the easiest classroom in the country. Every metro station is signed in both scripts, so you can test yourself and check the answer in the same second, and the old town carries hand-painted signage in every style from Asomtavruli pastiche to blunt modern Mtavruli.

Five mistakes, so you skip them

Four of the five we made ourselves, and the first one costs a bus.

Questions people ask about the letters