page_title: Irish orthography
section_title: Capitalisation
hierarchical_section_title: Irish orthography / Capitalisation
caption_attribution_description: English: Bilingual sign outside the Passport Office, Molesworth Street, Dublin 2, Ireland. Note that, even though the sign is ALLCAPS, there is actually a lowercase letter for the mutation P &gt; bP
context_page_description: Irish orthography has evolved over many centuries, since Old Irish was first written down in the Latin alphabet in about the 8th century AD. Prior to that, Primitive Irish was written in Ogham. Irish orthography is mainly based on etymological considerations, although a spelling reform in the mid-20th century simplified the relationship between spelling and pronunciation somewhat.
  There are three main dialect areas of spoken Irish: Ulster, Connacht, and Munster. Some spelling conventions are common to all three dialects, while others vary from dialect to dialect. In addition, individual words may have in a given dialect pronunciations that are not reflected by their spelling.
context_section_description: Capitalisation rules are similar to English. However, a prefix letter remains in lowercase when the base initial is capitalised (an tSín "China").  For text written in all caps, the prefix letter is often kept in lowercase, or small caps (STAIR NA HÉIREANN "THE HISTORY OF IRELAND").
  An initial capital is used for:
  The first word of a sentence
  Personal names and placenames, though not the words an, na, de (Micheál Ó Murchú "Michael Murphy"; Máire Mhac an tSaoi "Mary McEntee" de Búrca "Burke"; Sliabh na mBan "Slievenamon")
  Adjectives from personal names and placenames; though not for adjectives used in extended senses (bia Iodálach "Italian food", but cló iodálach "italic type")
  Names of months, feast-days, and languages (Meán Fómhair "September"; Oíche Nollag "Christmas Eve"; Fraincis "French")
  Names of days of the week (an Luan "Monday"), as well as Dé (Dé Luain "on Monday")
  Definite titles
  Names of God; though not pronouns referring to God
caption: Bilingual sign in Ireland. The eclipsis of P to bP uses lowercase in an otherwise all-caps text
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