What is the Georgian alphabet and how do you read signs?

Georgian is written in one alphabet today, called Mkhedruli, which has 33 letters, no capital or lowercase forms, and no silent letters: every character is pronounced the way it looks. UNESCO recognised Georgia’s writing tradition in 2016, inscribing “the living culture of three Georgian alphabets” (Asomtavruli, Nuskhuri and Mkhedruli) on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The nuance for a visitor is that Mkhedruli is the only one you need to read a street sign or a menu. The other two scripts survive mainly in church manuscripts and decorative carving. Most road signs, metro stops and menus in tourist areas carry a Latin transliteration underneath the Georgian, but transliteration is inconsistent between signs, maps and apps, so learning ten letter-shapes is more useful than memorising spellings.

Mkhedruli in brief

Mkhedruli (literally “cavalry” or “secular” script) developed from the older ecclesiastical alphabets over several centuries and became Georgia’s standard civil script. It has 5 vowels and 28 consonants, runs left to right, and each letter keeps one sound in one shape, so once you know the letters you can sound out any word even without understanding it.

UNESCO and the three alphabets

The inscription covers knowledge of writing and reading all three historical Georgian alphabets as a living practice, not a single museum object. It recognises calligraphers, teachers and manuscript conservators who keep Asomtavruli and Nuskhuri legible alongside everyday Mkhedruli, and it is the reason you will sometimes see all three forms carved together on church facades or museum labels.

Ten characters that unlock signs and menus

These are the letters that most often trip up visitors, because they have no exact English equivalent or because two similar-looking Latin spellings (t/t’, k/k’, p/p’) hide a real difference in Georgian.

The last pair matters for a practical reason: Georgian distinguishes an aspirated consonant from an unaspirated or ejective one, and both can appear as “t” or “k” in casual Latin spelling. It is why you will see Tbilisi spelled Tbilisi, Tiflis and occasionally Tpilisi on older maps and in historical English texts, all pointing to the same city.

Reading place names out loud

Georgian has no fixed written stress mark, and spoken stress is generally light and falls early in the word, so there is no strict rule to memorise for tourists. Three habits help more than any rule:

• Read every letter. There are no silent vowels or consonant clusters that collapse, so “Mtskheta” really is said with all four consonants running together at the start.
• Expect consonant clusters. Georgian allows strings such as “gvprtskvni” in theory, and real place names like Mtskheta or Mtirala are genuine, not typos.
• Double letters are usually two separate sounds, not one long one, as in Zugdidi or Lagodekhi.

If you want practice before arriving, walking the old core with a local on our Old Tbilisi Walking Tour is an easy way to match shop signs to sounds within the first hour.

Menus and signs in daily use

A handful of Mkhedruli words recur on almost every menu and signpost: ღვინო (ghvino, wine), პური (puri, bread), ხინკალი (khinkali, dumplings), ხაჭაპური (khachapuri, cheese bread), სუფრა (supra, feast table), and გზა (gza, road), useful on highway signs. Shop signs reading მაღაზია (maghazia) simply mean “shop,” and რესტორანი (restorani) is a direct transliteration of “restaurant.”

Where this comes from

The UNESCO inscription of the living culture of the three Georgian alphabets, its 2016 listing date and scope, are confirmed on UNESCO’s own Intangible Cultural Heritage pages. Letter values and script history follow standard linguistic reference sources. Figures were checked on 28 October 2026; for current transliteration standards used on new road signage, check georoad.gov.ge directly, since signage style can be updated by the roads authority.

Sources

• UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, living culture of three Georgian alphabets
• UNESCO Representative List overview
• Georgian National Tourism Administration, visitor information
• Georgia Travel, country portal
• Georgian Roads Department, road signage information