Now I’m a HUUUUUGE language nerd. Not so much in the actual speaking of them (tho not for lack of trying!) as much as in the actual development of new languages (ie conlangs, or constructed languages). Like, I’ve been making made up languages since high school, and there’s one I’ve been working on one since even before PA! existed. So seeing that the Galar Region had its own alphabet like this was a great cross-over between my loves in life.
Ever since its release, I’ve already uncovered and deciphered a lot about it, and I feel like there’s a lot MORE left to be uncovered and discovered. Here’s what I’ve sorted out so far:
Let’s get the basics out of the way:
I’m sure a lot of you are visiting this website for the first time and just want some straight forward answers about it. So here they are.
- Putting it simply, the Galarian Alphabet is what I would call “consistent gibberish“.
- On one hand, the characters don’t align to any one sound: in one word, D could mean “D” in one word, but it could also mean “G” in another. This is a regular occurrence across the ENTIRE game and EVERY word.
- On the other hand… that’s the thing: there IS some level of consistency with how the alphabet is used; it IS possible to determine that a certain word is SUPPOSED to mean something.
- For example, GV+E 4REVX is clearly “GAME FREAK”, while GA9A4 BEWCVE is obviously “GALAR LEAGUE”.
- This is why I call it “consistent gibberish“: even if the letters don’t match up—such as how 4 is used for both “F” and “R” and V is used for both “A” and “U”—we can still recognize that there is some level of consistency used, even if it’s used only on a per-word basis. It’s not used absolutely at random.
- However, it is unclear WHAT that potential consistency might be, such as if the artists were given free reign and thus a certain artist preferred to use one set of connections while another artist preferred another, or if this decision was made by those higher up.
- One thing is definitely clear: when a word clearly represents something, that “something” always matches up one-to-one with either English or rōmaji, or at least some Latin script. For example:
- English words — GA9A4 BEWCVE = “GALAR LEAGUE”, or
- Rōmaji forms of Japanese words — 94QQA7 = “YARROW”, not “MILO”, the Turffield Gym Leader
- Another reason why I don’t believe letters are used PURELY at random is the fact that some letters are clearly intended to be “lower case” letters, versus the other “UPPER CASE” letters. (More on that below.)
The fact that the letters don’t seem to match up to any single sound or value has made many people give up on it. But I think they’re just quitters! there’s more to the Galar language than other people give it credit for.
Other facts which I’ve uncovered so far include:
- The Galar Alphabet has 41 unique characters. As mentioned above, these characters also seem to represent both “UPPER CASE” and “lower case” letters. The 41 Galarian letters are:
- UPPER CASE — +?#34789ABCDEGJKLMQRSTVWXY
- lower case — !^01256FHINOPUZ
- The letters themselves seem to be based on existing characters from various languages and scripts. After close analysis, the four scripts that seem to be represented the most are:
- Greek; or its descendants, like Cyrillic or Coptic
- Runic languages, like Futhark or Anglo-Saxon
- Japanese, mostly Katakana, sometimes Hiragana
- Korean hangul
- Other characters are neither of these, and thus can come from Old English, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Georgian, etc. I plan on working on a guide which details the most likely inspiration for each character.
- The shape of the characters are used consistently; some exceptions exist, however, but those are errors made by the artists or programmers more than unique elements of the language.
- This covers if, say, a graphic element with Galarian letters on it was placed in reverse, or if a single character was drawn upside-down. I’ve also spotted a case where two “lower case” characters were placed one over the other to form a new characters, but I’m sure how intentional that was.
- One exception to this is with the letter 0 , which I thought was a mis-drawn O. However, as I went through the game I started seeing more and more words with 0in it… they were few and far between, but they DID exist. So I decided to count 0 as its own character versus a variant or poorly drawn O.
- Furthermore, the shape of the characters themselves don’t affect their apparent meaning.
- For example, a post on 4chan/vp/ claimed that the character X has a different meaning because one X is thicker than another X which means it’s an “M” versus “S”.
- Sorry Anon, but the only thing those different shapes represent is that it’s a different font or typeface used to type in Galarian (which is pretty dang neat IMHO).
- Normal numbers (ie Arabic numerals) exist in Galar, so Route signs still use numbers 0 to 9.
- Character frequency can also be used to determine some important facts about the Galarian language. For example:
- If the Galarian letters were used completely randomly, the frequency of each character used would be basically equal.
- Conversely, an alphabet used by a real language will use some letters significantly more than others (like how English uses E, O and T way more than Z, J, and Q).
- But as it turns out, some letters are definitely used more than other letters. Specifically:
- OE6AW are used the most (descending in that order)
- PY40G?# are used the least (also in descending in that order)
- The last four least used characters, 0, G, ? and #, are actually used SIGNIFICANTLY less then the other five. Like, the frequency of those first five characters decreases reasonably, only for the last four to bottom-out super fast. In fact, so far the character G only seems to be used when writing the word for “GALAR”, GA9A4, and not much else that I’ve seen.
- Anyways, the fact that the Galarian character’s frequency of use is somewhere between “evenly used” (if it was random) and “some used significantly more than others” (if it was a true language) suggests that perhaps some of the element artists for SwSh had a specific intention to make the language look “recognizable”, while some artists simply didn’t give a crap and tossed together letters at random and then copied-and-pasted those letters in multiple places.
- In fact, below is a perfect example of an example of an artist that was lazy and did the bare minimum to make it “look realistic”.

There is also a Galarian Word List page where I’ve written down every Galarian word I could find; in fact, I still haven’t reached the 4th Gym yet because I’ve been spending all my time with finding words! Anyways, the Galarian Word List also further discusses the idea that some words are intended to be specific words, such as how:
- 1 ^OH = “1 car”
- 2+ ^OHZ = “2+ cars”
The Word List will slowly determining if any particular word is pure “gibberish” or if it actually does have an intended meaning.
…
That’s it for now! Thanks for checking out my site and I hope you’ll stick around for more!
(Below this, you can read some of my older thoughts and ideas about the Galarian Alphabet, but I plan on removing it later, or replacing it with a more details breakdown of the above bullet points.)
GALARIAN ALPHABET VALUES:
Right now I’m still working out trying to get screenshots and other pieces of evidence to share with you guys… but for now here are two examples of the script, which in turn will explain my three hypothesis for the Galar alphabet.


Note, inconsistent use of characters, like how the “G” of “GALAR” isn’t the same as the “G” in “LEAGUE”, can easily be handwaved because this is common in other languages; “C” can make both a “K” and “S” sound in English (Cola vs Cents), and G itself has two sounds (GIF vs GIF). So it’s possible that Galarian itself has similar sounds for different characters.
The problem with accepting one or the other is that…
- if we accept “GAME FREAK”, that might mean the second picture spells something like “G***F *E**AE”
- if we accept “GALAR LEAGUE”, that might mean the first picture spells out “GU*E R*EU*”
Now it’s possible that one is absolutely correct and thus the other really does intend to spell the other word. But even with in both cases in mind, they lead me to my three hypothesis:
- HYPOTHESIS 1: The Galar alphabet is a simple cipher, where one symbol represents one specific letter of an existing language… and that language is perhaps English or Japanese. That is to say, words, once deciphered, spell out existing English or Japanese words.
- HYPOTHESIS 2: The Galar alphabet is a simple cipher, where one symbol represents one specific letter of an existing language… and that language is a completely made up language (the “Galarian language“), thus with its own consistent rules. That is to say, words, once deciphered, spell out words in a unique “Galar language”, like “HABY” = “fire” or “ERT” = “gym”.
- HYPOTHESIS 3: The Galar alphabet is complete gibberish and there is no consistent use of its letters to spell anything.
Examples of #1 is that I’ve spotted words which COULD be “GYM”, “INN”, “DAN” (as in, “Yell-dan”, Japanese for “Team”), the aforementioned “GALAR LEAGUE”, obviously “GAME FREAK”, etc.
Examples of #3 is the idea that the characters in “GAME FREAK” don’t spell “GALAR LEAGUE”, and/or vice versa. Likewise, I’ve seen other examples where the characters used in “GAME FREAK” don’t apply to words which might be actual words, producing gibberish instead.
I don’t have any examples of #2, but the fact that I consider #3 a possibility might just be that I didn’t do enough research and/or made mistakes and thus didn’t realize it was just spelling words in a unique “Galar language”.
Unfortunately, my research on this is still fresh. Afterall, I’ve only had the game for two days now, and I also deliberately avoided materials relating to it such that I wouldn’t be spoiled, and thus I’m certainly behind other people’s work. For example, there’s a Galar alphabet character tester website, complete with what appears to be the full alphabet. Take a look here.
GALARIAN ALPHABET INSPIRATION:
On the other hand, one other fun part about sorting out the Galarian alphabet is seeing which languages and scripts any particular Galarian character comes from. Some of them are obvious, others less so, but I definitely would like to sort out what their inspirations were and share them with you.
Until I get some pictures up, I can at least share a few observations; the following are easily recognized, albeit in various rotations or are flipped:
- There are obviously Latin characters in it, such as Y M V X
- The Old English character eth can be seen, albeit backwards: Ð
- Some appear to be Greek, such as: Ξ Σ Ψ
- Cyrillic is used, particularly: Г Ч Ф Я Л
- Japanese katakana characters include: ラ ム ル
- As do Korean hangul characters like: ㅅ ㅔ ㅈ ㅋ
- And finally it looks like these Hebrew characters were worked in: פ א ק
Of course it’s worth noting that these scripts share some characters between them, one of the most obvious one being characters like L which are drawn by simply drawing a right angle.
Eventually I plan on making a handy little picture guide covering all the different inspirations for these characters, so keep an eye out for it here!
OK, that’s all I have for right now. I’ll share more of my research as soon as I work more stuff out.
Now personally I think it’s going to be a mix of both Hypothesis #1 and #3, tho mostly the latter. A lot of the text just doesn’t seem to link up at all, or is consistent only within itself… I’ll share what I mean later… and thus I feel like Game Freak simply just threw random characters together. Not to mention the controversy that Game Freak seems to have lied about all the work they put into it and/or refused to put into it, so it seems like an odd allocation of resources to have someone work out making up a new language and alphabet, or at least a cipher for an existing one, when just randomly generating “text” would be sufficient.
Hmmm…
22 Comments
There’s also the “now loading” text when you start up the game that doesn’t seem to fit almost any other examples from in game.
Oh really? I didn’t notice that… I’ll keep an eye out for it. Thanks for the FYI!
One thing I want to do is get a proper word list together, but then separate them based on different attributes, like town signs, random text on posters, and even in-game text like “Game Freak” and “Now Loading”.
The W in Now Loading is the same as the K in Game Freak, adding to the double usage of letters.
26 upper case letters,
but only 15 lower case ones?
i think some are missing, but at the least even if it turns out galar isnt used consistently, doesnt mean the missing 11 characters cam be made up and all the characters assigned manually for a sort of faux galar script to use.
Yeah, and even then those 15 “lower case” letters usually only appear in “junk text”, rarely in actual proper names or words.
As for if there are any more missing letters… well, on one hand, I think I’ve found just about every letter in the language. On the other hand, I didn’t even notice two of them—specifically? and # —until AFTER I finished the first draft of the Galarian font, so I wouldn’t be surprised if more popped up later on, and only because it’s used literally ONCE in the entire game, just like those other two letters along with 0 and g .
Now if those hypothetical 11 missing characters pop up, it’ll definitely help the script make more sense, or at least it’ll give us a chance to see if there is a one-to-one correlation to them. But then again, we should still be able to connect the ones that do exist, right? So then… which uppercase letter does6 the lower case form of: T or 9 ?
Me personally, I have doubts that the “lower case” characters are actual lower case letters of other Galarian letters, and thus are intended to be unique characters in their own right. However, that doesn’t mean some random intern artist at Game Freak didn’t see it that way and wrote up a bunch of junk text using them under the assumption that they WERE “lower case” characters. In any case, I’m keeping this all in mind for the eventual video on the Galarian script.
Is there a way that it could be based on something like Gaelic languages. No idea if its the right direction but maybe there is something
So far I haven’t seen any indication that it’s based on any ONE language. In fact the characters themselves come from a number of different language/script sources… I’m working on a post about this very soon.
That said… maybe the actual letters spell something out? Like we treatf as “F” and M as “M”? Or even what their original inspiration letter would be, such as E as the Greek letter Ξ (Xi)? That’s something that’s worth looking into… but I won’t know what each letter is actually based on until I finish that post about it.
So I guess just keep an eye out for it soon!
Sweet. Thank you. Will look forward to it
Hi Nick15,
Every since I got Pokemon ORAS, I always wondered about the strange alphabet that can be seen on screens in the PokeMarts.
It appears to include some Hangul characters like “ㅔ”and “ㅋ”
I’ve searched high and low to find any resource that talks about it but have been unsuccessful.
Have you ever noticed it, or know much about it?
Howdy Andrew114!
I actually really haven’t played much of ORAS, so I haven’t noticed the script you’re talking about. Sorry!
BUT! I’ve been looking for an excuse to play it proper, so maybe I’ll give it another go soon and keep an eye out for it. In that case, watch the site for more info!
So I thought I would try to decipher something for fun too. After some time I went to Circhester to see the signs of the hotels at the circular fountain. The buildings are just mirrored including the signs so I think they just do not care about the writings at all.
It is complete gibbrish.
I spent 2 days trying decyphering. Gave up when I realized that, for exemple, what was commonly assocated with an “O” sound was used for “B”, and so on.
Take the Japanese names of the main characters (the latin version, not the kana version, you can find them on Bulbapedia). When you compare them to thier signatures on league cards (a last the one who a readable), it matches perfectly. But when you look afterwards, the charcters used to translitterate their names in Galarian alphabet are completly diffrent to one an other.
Example :
Chairman Rose (Rose) “O” is an “O”
Milo (Yarrow) “O” is for “R”
Bede (Beet) “O” is “B”…
And so on. If the letters were diffrent, but souded close, well, maybe it should have been a thing like a sound-shift rule depending, for example, on which is the next vowel/consonent, and so on… But it’s random here, one letter to represent sevral vowels and consonents…
Even in context there is not concistency. I studied the signs. The words that I thought where the city names the word for “Gym” or “Stadium” is somtimes the same across sevral cities. An somtimes dosn’t even matches the description sign of the city itseft.
A logic must exist. For sure, and I’m conviced that evreything written has an true origin. But as I see it, it’s diffrent each time the art designer had to put some text in Galarian:
Word in English (or Latin alphabet in general) -> Random Galarian letters (by keeping consistency in it’s own translitteration).
Sorry for my missspellings, I did not really read myself before posting and I’m not a native English-speaker… :o)
It’s no problem! Like, half of my family is Korean, so it’s actually easy for me to understand English from non-native speakers. Plus, your English is better than my… uh.. whatever language you speak
so don’t feel bad about the misspellings.
Hey Lugiadri1, sorry for the late reply!
But yeah, I’m with you on it being gibberish yet some kind of logic must exist. Like, it’s obviously not COMPLETE gibberish, but it’s definitely not something with a CLEAR syntax.
I had a super long comment for you, but I thought it would be better off as a post in its own right. So this post here was intended for you!
* http://www.pokemonaaah.net/news/2020/05/galarianthoughts/
Hi! I decided to look into deciphering the language too, out of curiosity, and feel into a lot of the same problems with consistency. One that I noticed (which is more likely an artist being rushed and not having time to create a new sign) is that one of the Turffield town signs is identical to the sign next to the Wild Area nursery
I’ve kinda figured the same thing, that maybe the development artists just stopped caring about trying to keep things consistent and proper, so they just repeat objects and texts all over the place.
I had written more, but I had actually written TOO much, so I put the rest of my reply in the following post. Check it out!
* http://www.pokemonaaah.net/news/2020/05/galarianthoughts/
I want to point out that pokemon let’s go Eevee had signs with strange symbols too. For example there is a sign in Veridian City that greatly resembles the town signs in Galar just not as complex. I wonder if they are working on adding regional pseudo alphabets to various regions this generation to give the illusion of being in different cultures that use different alphabets?
Hey, have you compared with the runes seen in M12 (Arceus movie?) I noticed quite a few character matches, which would mean the Pokemon Team has been making this alphabet for a while. Here’s my (outdated) translation attempt, as well as some screencaps:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16fV6j-dCKizKNkM5k1UHysFZqvXZ-fp1jK3Gst3rVBU/edit?usp=drivesdk
Jeremy, those look like futhark runes. I think the pokemon galar script may be inspired by them but I dont think that alphabet from the Arceus thing is identical.
That’s what I thought too, but several don’t match with Futhark or any other runic language (but *do* match with symbols in the Galar alphabet). Wasn’t saying they were identical, but they are a clue that whoever’s in charge of this has been collecting and holding on to different runes from a variety of languages for a long time (at least 10 years).
Oh oops I never saw this reply. Sorry. The problem is, the runes maybe be some decorative font they’ve been holding onto, or they could just be reused leftovers. Have you ever heard of the Skyrim bugs jars? People thought the symbols on the jar lids held some secret message but it turned out they were meaningless and just leftovers from a bug collection quest The developers decided not to put in the game but forgot to take thr actual items from the quest out of the final version that they released when it was released for sale. Could be why. Maybe they had some connections to Arceus or other scripts in other games planned but cut them out of final version of Galar