The Livo­ni­an orthog­ra­phy or writ­ing sys­tem orig­i­nates with the first pub­lished works by lin­guists doc­u­ment­ing Livo­ni­an in the 19th cen­tu­ry. The present form of the Livo­ni­an writ­ing sys­tem came into exis­tence dur­ing pre-WWII Lat­vian inde­pen­dence peri­od. Some changes have been made over time, but it is still quite sim­i­lar to the form it had in the 1930s.

The table below shows the let­ters of the present-day Livo­ni­an spelling sys­tem in the left column, the IPA equiv­a­lents for each let­ter in the mid­dle column, and approx­i­ma­tions in Eng­lish for each sound in the right column. The­se equiv­a­lents should only be tak­en as a fair­ly gen­er­al guide, as the sound sys­tems of Eng­lish and Livo­ni­an are quite dif­fer­ent. For an inter­est­ing recent in depth lin­guis­tic analy­sis of the Livo­ni­an sound sys­tem see Tuuli Tuisk’s 2016 on this top­ic.

Pri­or to WWII, pub­lished Livo­ni­an texts also includ­ed the let­ters ö, ȫ, y, ȳ cor­re­spond­ing to the front round­ed vow­els /œ, œ:, y, y:/. The­se sounds were not, how­ev­er, in gen­er­al use dur­ing the inter­war inde­pen­dence peri­od and in lat­er ortho­graph­ic reforms were removed from the Livo­ni­an orthog­ra­phy. The let­ters ö, ȫ, y, ȳ cor­re­spond to e, ē, i, ī in present-day spelling (e.g., ‘night’ his­tor­i­cal­ly spelled ȳö, is now spelled īe).

Lin­guis­tic texts use two addi­tion­al sym­bols. An apos­tro­phe ’ is used to mark the syl­la­bles with stød, the tonal con­trast found in Livo­ni­an (dis­cussed in the Livo­ni­an Gram­mar sec­tion). The long low back vow­el ǭ is not­ed in more recent lin­guis­tic schol­ar­ship, includ­ing Viit­so & Ernštre­its’ 2012 Livo­ni­an-Esto­ni­an-Lat­vian dic­tio­nary. As Tuisk 2016 notes, ǭ occurs in the East­ern Livo­ni­an dialect and is pro­nounced as ā in the West­ern Livo­ni­an dialect (e.g., East­ern Livo­ni­an mǭ, West­ern Livo­ni­an mā ‘earth’; East­ern Livo­ni­an rǭn­tõz, West­ern Livo­ni­an rān­tõz ‘book’; etc.).

The Modern Livonian Orthography

The 19th cen­tu­ry Sjö­gren-Wiede­mann orthog­ra­phy

In the first gram­mar and lin­guis­tic study of Livo­ni­an, pub­lished in 1861 by Andreas Johan Sjö­gren and Fer­di­nand Johann Wiede­mann, a dif­fer­ent orthog­ra­phy was used. This writ­ing sys­tem explic­it­ly marks some fea­tures not marked in the mod­ern orthog­ra­phy. Cor­re­spon­dences between the Sjö­gren-Wiede­mann orthog­ra­phy (left column) and the mod­ern orthog­ra­phy (mid­dle column) are given in the table below. All oth­er let­ters can be assumed to have the same val­ue as in the mod­ern orthog­ra­phy. If fur­ther expla­na­tions are nec­es­sary, the­se are given in the right column. The cur­rent sum­ma­ry does not endeav­or to explain the dif­fer­ences between two or more let­ters in the Sjö­gren-Wiede­mann orthog­ra­phy that are writ­ten with the same let­ter in the mod­ern orthog­ra­phy (e.g. the /a/ with a macron above and the /a/ with macron below, writ­ten sim­ply as /a/ with macron above).

Correspondences between the Sjögren-Wiedemann and Modern Orthographies

Sjö­gren-Wiede­mann Orthog­ra­phy	Mod­ern Orthog­ra­phy	Com­ments
	ā
	ǟ
	ō
	ö (no longer used)	The sound /œ/ writ­ten with the let­ter ö pri­or to WWII. This sound is no longer dis­tin­guished in Livo­ni­an and all instances of ö are writ­ten as e in the con­tem­po­rary Livo­ni­an writ­ten lan­guage.
	õ
	ȭ
	ȯ ȱ
	ū
	y (no longer used)	The sound /y/ writ­ten with the let­ter y pri­or to WWII. This sound is no longer dis­tin­guished in Livo­ni­an and all instances of y are writ­ten as i in the con­tem­po­rary Livo­ni­an writ­ten lan­guage.
	ȳ (no longer used)	The sound /y:/ writ­ten with the let­ter ȳ pri­or to WWII. This sound is no longer dis­tin­guished in Livo­ni­an and all instances of ȳ are writ­ten as ī in the con­tem­po­rary Livo­ni­an writ­ten lan­guage.
	ḑ ļ ņ ŗ ț	Palatal­iza­tion in the Sjö­gren-Wiede­mann orthog­ra­phy with an acute accent mark above or fol­low­ing the palatal­ized con­so­nant.
	k p s	Palatal­ized k, p, s. In the mod­ern orthog­ra­phy writ­ten as k, p, s before the short diph­thong ie.
	n ng	The sound /ŋ/ writ­ten with ṅ before k and g in the Sjö­gren-Wiede­mann orthog­ra­phy is writ­ten with n in the mod­ern orthog­ra­phy. In oth­er posi­tions, ṅ is typ­i­cal­ly writ­ten as ng in the mod­ern orthog­ra­phy.