Morse Code in Other Languages

One Code, Many Alphabets

International Morse Code was designed for the 26-letter Latin alphabet — but telegraphs spanned the globe, and Russian, Japanese, Greek, and Arabic operators all needed to send their own languages over the wire. The solution the world converged on was elegant: don't invent new code points — reuse the existing ones. Non-Latin scripts map their characters onto the same dots-and-dashes already defined for Latin letters, digits, and punctuation. A Russian operator's ...- means Ж; an English operator's ...- means V. The signal on the wire is identical — only the decoding table changes.

This design keeps every language's morse within the same short, efficient code lengths (adding brand-new longer codes for each new character would have made transmissions painfully slow). The tradeoff: the same code point can mean completely different things in different languages, so both sides must agree on the alphabet first. Japanese even has dedicated prosigns for announcing the switch mid-conversation (see Wabun below).

Russian Morse Code (Cyrillic)

Russian Morse is the most widely used non-Latin system, and its design rule is simple: Cyrillic letters that sound like Latin letters share their codes (А = .- like A, М = -- like M, Т = - like T), while Cyrillic letters with no Latin equivalent take the codes of Latin letters with no Cyrillic equivalent (Щ takes Q's code, Ы takes Y's). The same correspondence later shaped the KOI-7 and KOI-8 Russian character encodings for computers.

The interesting part is the letters that don't match their lookalikes — these are the ones to learn:

• Ё has no separate international code — operators send it as Е (.).
• Ukrainian Morse uses І (..) for И, adds Ї (.---), and uses Є in place of Э.
• Bulgarian follows the same table with two swaps: it uses Ъ for the -..- slot (Russian Ь) and Ь for the -.-- slot (Russian Ы), since Bulgarian doesn't use Ы.

Codes verified against the published Russian national standard table. If you're learning Russian CW (as ham operators call morse), the trainer drills the shared Latin code points — the rhythms are identical, only the letters change.

Japanese: Wabun Code

Japanese needed something more radical than letter-swapping: kana are syllables, not letters, and there are ~48 of them. The answer was Wabun code (和文モールス符号) — a complete separate morse system where each kana has its own code. Crucially, the sounds are unrelated to the Latin letters that share the code points: い (i) is .-, the same signal as Latin A, but it has nothing to do with "a". Wabun is a re-mapping of the same dots and dashes onto a totally different sound inventory.

Because the two systems share the airwaves, Japanese operators use dedicated switch prosigns: send -..--- (<DO>) to announce "Wabun follows," and ...-. (<SN>) to switch back to International. (These are real prosigns — see our prosigns reference.) A taste of the kana table, in traditional iroha order:

• Voiced marks: the dakuten ゛ (which voices か→が) has its own code, .. — sent after the base kana.
• Wabun was documented for radio use in Japanese regulations and described in English as early as a 1942 QST article on the Japanese morse telegraph code.
• During WWII, Allied signals intelligence devoted enormous effort to intercepting Japanese Wabun traffic — one of the lesser-known codebreaking fronts of the Pacific war.

Korean Morse Code (Hangul)

Korean Hangul morse has one of the longest pedigrees of any non-Latin system: a specification was first published in 1888 in the Chŏnbo changjŏng (Telegraph Regulations) by Kim Hagu, the language-talented modernizer who had proposed Korea's telegraph network to King Gojong. The system has been used in largely the same form ever since — the only later additions were codes for ㅔ and ㅐ, which the original lacked.

Korean morse maps Hangul jamo (the alphabet's building blocks) to International Morse code points via the SKATS mapping — originally developed to let Korean be typed on Western typewriters. The mapping is arbitrary relative to pronunciation (like Wabun, shared code points don't imply shared sounds):

The codes above are cross-verified between the published Hangul table and their Latin equivalents; the full jamo table runs to all 24 basic letters plus the two later additions. Like Japanese, Korean morse treats each jamo as an independent signal — syllable blocks are assembled by the reader, not the code.

Greek Morse Code

Greek morse is the friendliest non-Latin system for Latin readers: each Greek letter takes the code of the Latin letter it looks like (Α→A) or sounds like, with the look winning ties. Β (beta) sounds like English V but takes B's code (-...) because the glyphs match. The system drops the Latin codes it doesn't need (J, U, V) and adds exactly one extra: Χ (chi) gets the otherwise-unused ----.

• The tonos (accent mark) is never transmitted — the receiver infers it.
• Old Greek tables list diphthong codes (e.g. OY = ..-), but they're obsolete: modern practice sends the two vowels separately.
• Fun quirk: Ψ takes Q's code purely because Q is spare — the two letters have no historical, phonetic, or visual relationship at all.

Hebrew Morse Code

Hebrew letters map to Latin code points mostly by similar sound (ב "bet" → B), with a few mapped by similar shape instead (ט "tet" → U, because the shape resembles U more than its "t" sound suggests; ת "tav" keeps T). One structural difference: Hebrew morse is transcribed right-to-left, like the script itself.

The full table covers all 22 letters on the same principle. Note the elegant economy: Hebrew's most common letters got the shortest codes, just as Vail's frequency analysis did for English — the mapping inherits the efficiency of the Latin table for free.

Arabic Morse Code

Arabic letters are mapped to International Morse code points largely by similar sound. The table below shows the core mappings; be aware that published Arabic morse tables show some regional variation for the less-common letters, so treat this as the widely documented standard and confirm locally before transmitting.

Persian (Farsi) and Kurdish use closely related tables built on the Arabic mappings with additions for their extra letters (پ, چ, ژ, گ and others) — the same "reuse the code points" principle extended one layer further. Devanagari (Hindi/Marathi) has had several proposed telegraph codes since the 1940s–60s, including Ashok Kelkar's system that encodes via Latin-letter digraphs — but unlike the systems above, no single Devanagari table achieved universal adoption, so we describe the approach rather than publish a table.

Spanish & Extended Latin

Languages using the Latin alphabet with extra letters mostly need just a few additions — and International Morse already reserves codes for them:

The Spanish Ñ (--.--) is special: it's a code that exists in neither International Morse nor the old Gerke system — a genuinely language-specific addition. Our translator supports the accented ITU letters (Ä, Ö, Ü, É) in its extended set; Ñ is flagged as unsupported, so spell it as N or write it out.

Chinese: The Telegraph Codebook

Chinese breaks the pattern entirely — and it's the most fascinating adaptation on this page. With thousands of characters and no alphabet, mapping symbols to code points was hopeless. So Chinese telegraphy took a different path: the Chinese telegraph code assigns every character a four-digit number from a codebook (around 9,800 characters today; about 7,000 when the system launched in 1871), and operators transmit the digits in standard morse. Chinese morse traffic is therefore all numbers — the receiver looks each group up in the codebook to recover the characters.

The codebook was developed in the early 1870s (the Viguier code, created for the Great Northern Telegraph Company in Shanghai), and skilled telegraphers memorized thousands of the common codes, reading number groups as fluently as words. The system is still used today — notably by law enforcement — as an unambiguous way to record Chinese names in non-Chinese scripts. There is no way to "sound out" a Chinese morse message without the codebook: the numbers are arbitrary, and 0022 means 中 only because the book says so.

American (Railroad) Morse: The Original

Before International Morse, there was American Morse — the code Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail actually designed in the 1840s for US landline telegraphs (hence "Railroad Morse": it lived on in American railroads into the 20th century). It is a different system, not a dialect:

• Intra-character spaces: some American Morse characters contain spaces inside the character — e.g. the letter O is dot-space-dot. Spacing carried meaning at two levels, not just between letters.
• Two dash lengths: a short dash (2 dot-units) and a long dash, versus International's single 3-unit dash.
• Shorter characters on average — American Morse uses more dot elements — so in principle it transmitted faster than International Morse.
• …but harder to time correctly. Inexperienced operators sent garbled "hog morse," and the dense dot patterns suffered badly from intersymbol interference on long submarine cables. The practical fix was to slow down — erasing the speed advantage.

Those timing fragilities are why the world standardized on International Morse at the 1865 Paris convention instead. American Morse hung on in US landline and railroad use for decades but is now effectively extinct as a living system — preserved by enthusiasts and museums. Everything on this site, including the translator, is International Morse: if you paste American Morse code into it, the intra-character spaces will decode as letter breaks and the result will be wrong. The two systems are not interchangeable.

Side-by-Side: How the Systems Compare

The pattern across the whole table: nobody re-engineered the signal. They re-engineered the mapping — except Chinese, which sidestepped the problem with a codebook, and American, which predates the standard everyone else converged on. Learn the International alphabet and its timing first; every other system on this page is a re-labeling of those same rhythms.

Frequently asked questions

Master the Base System First

Every language on this page is a re-mapping of International Morse. Learn it properly — the alphabet hub, the timing guide, and the trainer — and you'll already know the rhythms; only the labels change.