Luxembourgish Braille

Luxembourgish Braille is the braille alphabet of the Luxembourgish language. It is very close to French Braille, but is eight-dot braille, with an extra pair of dots at the bottom of each cell to indicate capitalization and accent marks. It is the only eight-dot alphabet listed in Unesco (2013). Children start off with the older six-dot script (Unesco 1990), then switch to eight-dot when they start primary school and learn numbers.^[1]

Alphabet

The Luxembourgish Braille alphabet started off as a reduced set of the letters of the French Braille alphabet, the basic 26 plus three letters for print vowels with diacritics: ⠿ é, ⠫ ë, ⠜ ä. With the shift to eight-point script, these three acquired an extra dot at point 8. The letters are thus:

a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h	i	j
k	l	m	n	o	p	q	r	s	t
u	v	w	x	y	z	ä	ë	é

Dot-7 is added to form capitals:

A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	J
K	L	M	N	O	P	Q	R	S	T
U	V	W	X	Y	Z	Ä	Ë	É

Apart from the accented letters, these are the letter forms of the Gardner–Salinas Braille code used for technical notation. The digits 1–9 (but not 0) are also as in Gardner–Salinas. However, Luxembourgish punctuation is quite different.

Numbers

The Antoine notation being promoted in France is used for numbers. However, because there is no possibility of confusing these digits with the letters of the Luxembourgish alphabet, as there is with the French Braille alphabet, they are written without the French number sign ⟨⠠⟩.^[2] That is, in Luxembourgish Braille, numbers are simply written as they are in print, without requiring any special indication that they are numbers.

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Punctuation

The exclamation mark is unusual, and brackets are in effect capitalized braces.

,

.

!

'

?

;

:

“ ... ”

( ... )

{ ... }

[ ... ]

Formatting

Formatting is used for emphasis and the like. There are no capitalization or number signs in 8-dot Luxembourgish Braille.

References

• UNESCO (2013) World Braille Usage, 3rd edition.