What alphabet does Albanian use, and how many letters does it have?

Albanian uses a Latin-based alphabet of 36 letters — 7 vowels and 29 consonants. It was standardised at the Congress of Manastir in 1908, which chose the unified Latin script still used today.

Two of the letters carry diacritics: ç (like the "ch" in "church") and ë (a soft, neutral vowel similar to the "a" in "about", often barely pronounced at the end of a word). The alphabet also includes nine digraphs — dh, gj, ll, nj, rr, sh, th, xh, and zh — each treated as a single letter representing one sound.

For learners, the payoff is that the alphabet is essentially phonetic: each letter maps to one consistent sound, so once you know the 36 letters you can sound out almost any word you meet, without the spelling traps English sets.