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Estonian orthography is the system used for writing the Estonian language and is based on the Latin alphabet. The Estonian orthography is generally guided by phonemic principles, with each grapheme corresponding to one phoneme .
Estonian employs the Latin script as the basis for its alphabet. The script adds the letters ä , ö , ü , and õ , plus the later additions š and ž . The letters c , q , w , x and y are limited to proper names of foreign origin, and f , z , š , and ž appear in loanwords and foreign names only.
There are 9 vowels and 36 diphthongs, 28 of which are native to Estonian. [1] All nine vowels can appear as the first component of a diphthong, but only /ɑ, e, i, o, u/ occur as the second component. A vowel characteristic of Estonian is the unrounded back vowel /ɤ/, which may be close-mid back, close back, or close-mid central. [2]
The charts below show the way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents Estonian pronunciations in Wikipedia articles. For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters.
In Estonian, Õ is the 27th letter of the alphabet (between W and Ä), and it represents a vowel characteristic of Estonian, the unrounded back vowel /ɤ/, which may be close-mid back, close back, or close-mid central. [1]
Ü (lowercase ü) is a Latin script character composed of the letter U and the diaeresis diacritical mark. In some alphabets such as those of a number of Romance languages or Guarani it denotes an instance of regular U to be construed in isolation from adjacent characters with which it would usually form a larger unit; other alphabets like the Azerbaijani, Estonian, German, Hungarian and ...
It is the 20th letter of the Estonian alphabet, where it is used in loan words. It is the 22nd letter of the Karelian and Veps alphabets. It is the 29th letter of the Northern Sami alphabet, where it represents . It is regarded as a variant of Z in Finnish.
Estonian Braille uses the international (read French) norms for the letters ä ö ü. Š and ž are mirror-images of s and z , a strategy found in other alphabets. Õ is the mirror-image of ä , as the mirror-image of o is used for ö .