Aibítir na Gaeilge: The Irish Alphabet, Letter by Letter

Irish is written with the letters you are reading right now — just fewer of them. Aibítir na Gaeilge, the Irish alphabet, has eighteen letters: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u.

That leaves eight familiar letters out. j, k, q, v, w, x, y and z are not part of the traditional alphabet, and you will only meet them in borrowings and foreign names — veain (a van), jíp (a jeep), xileafón (a xylophone).

The five vowels also appear in a long form, marked with the síneadh fada: á, é, í, ó, ú. That brings the recording below to twenty-three sounds — every letter here is playable. Each clip is the letter's sound, spoken once, taken from a children's Irish alphabet where each letter was read aloud and followed by the example word listed beside it.

The transcriptions under each word are the broad IPA used in our reference dictionary. Pronunciations shift from place to place, so treat them as a guide — our guide to the three dialects shows what changes.

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The Eighteen Letters

Tap a play button to hear the letter sound. The middle column gives the Irish name of the letter, which is what you use when spelling a word aloud.

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The Long Vowels: á, é, í, ó, ú

The acute accent over a vowel is called the síneadh fada — the lengthening mark. It is not decoration. Hold the vowel longer and you may well be saying a different word: fear is a man, but féar is grass; cead is permission, but céad is a hundred.

Vowel letters take their names from their long sound — A is called á, E is called é — so these five clips double as the names of a, e, i, o and u.

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Broad and Slender

Every Irish consonant has two flavours. Beside a, o or u it is broad (leathan); beside e or i it is slender (caol). The vowel you write next to a consonant is the instruction for how to say it.

Listen to the difference between the two s sounds above. In solas (light) the s is broad and hisses; in sin (that) it is slender, and sounds like the sh in "she." Same letter, two different sounds — and the spelling tells you which one to use.

This is also why Irish spelling looks so vowel-heavy to English eyes. The rule is caol le caol agus leathan le leathan — slender with slender, and broad with broad — so vowels are matched on either side of a consonant cluster. Those vowels are not padding; they are pronunciation.

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The Letter H Earns Its Place

H is a letter in its own right (héis), but it is also the alphabet's mark of change. Put an h after a consonant and you have lenition (séimhiú) — the sound softens: cat (a cat) becomes an chat (the cat), mo + mac becomes mo mhac (my son).

Lenition used to be written with a dot above the letter — ċat, ṁac — and you still see that ponc séimhithe in older books and on signs. The h spelling is what Irish schools teach today. The other mutation, eclipsis (urú), works in the opposite direction: a new letter takes over the sound, which is why Baile Átha Cliath becomes i mBaile Átha Cliath for "in Dublin."

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Older Than These Letters

Irish was written before the Latin alphabet arrived. Ogham — the earliest form of written Irish, cut into standing stones between roughly the fourth and sixth centuries — used groups of straight strokes along a line, and its letters were named after trees: beith (birch), coll (hazel), dair (oak).

Latin letters came in with Christianity, and the language has used them ever since. Even the word for alphabet carries the ancestry: aibítir comes from the Latin abecedarium — literally an ABC.

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