Glottal stop (letter)

The character ⟨ʔ⟩, called glottal stop, is an alphabetic letter in some Latin alphabets, most notable in several languages of Canada where it indicates a glottal stop sound. Such usage derives from phonetic transcription, for example the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), that use this letter for the glottal stop sound. The letter derives graphically from use of the apostrophe ⟨ʼ⟩ for glottal stop.

"ˀ" redirects here. For the prosodic feature in Danish also transcribed with this character, see stød.
Unicase and cased glottal-stop letters

Graphic variants
Road sign in British Columbia showing the use of the digit ⟨7⟩ to represent /ʔ/ in the Squamish language.

Where ⟨ʔ⟩ is not available, not being in the basic Latin alphabet, it is sometimes replaced by a question mark ⟨?⟩, which is its official representation in the SAMPA transcription scheme. In Skwomesh or Squamish, ⟨ʔ⟩ may be replaced by the digit ⟨7⟩ (see image at right).

In Unicode, four graphic variants of the glottal stop letter are available.

  • Unicase ⟨ʔ⟩ (U+0294 ʔ LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP) is provided for the International Phonetic Alphabet and Americanist phonetic notation. It is found in a number of orthographies that use the IPA/APA symbol, such as those of several Salishan languages.
  • A case pair, uppercase ⟨Ɂ⟩ (U+0241 Ɂ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER GLOTTAL STOP) and lowercase ⟨ɂ⟩ (U+0242 ɂ LATIN SMALL LETTER GLOTTAL STOP), is provided for the orthographies of several Athabaskan languages. Uppercase ⟨Ɂ⟩ may be slightly wider than unicase ⟨ʔ⟩ in fonts that distinguish them.
  • Superscript ⟨ˀ⟩ (U+02C0 ˀ MODIFIER LETTER GLOTTAL STOP) that is used in the IPA and the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet.

Other common symbols for the glottal stop sound are variants of the punctuation mark apostrophe that was the historical basis of the glottal stop letters. These include the 9-shaped modifier letter apostrophe, ⟨ʼ⟩, which is probably the most common (and the direct ancestor of ⟨ʔ⟩), the 6-shaped ʻokina of Hawaiian, ⟨ʻ⟩, and the straight-apostrophe shaped saltillo of many languages of Mexico, which has the case forms ⟨Ꞌ ꞌ⟩.

Usage

Technical transcription

Vernacular orthographies

Computing codes

In Unicode 1.0, only the unicase and superscript variants were included. In version 4.1 (2005), an uppercase character was added, and the existing unicase character was redefined as its lowercase. Then, in version 5.0 (2006), it was decided to separate the cased and caseless usages by adding a dedicated lowercase letter. The IPA character is first from left, while the extended Latin alphabet characters are third and fourth from left.[1]

Character ʔˀɁɂ
Unicode name LATIN LETTER
GLOTTAL STOP		MODIFIER LETTER
GLOTTAL STOP		LATIN CAPITAL LETTER
GLOTTAL STOP		LATIN SMALL LETTER
GLOTTAL STOP
Character encoding decimalhexdecimalhexdecimalhexdecimalhex
Unicode 660029470402C057702415780242
UTF-8 202 148CA 94203 128CB 80201 129C9 81201 130C9 82
Numeric character reference ʔʔˀˀɁɁɂɂ
gollark: Yep.
gollark: What have you been doing, then?
gollark: Could you show a simple program in your language then?
gollark: If you want something easier to parse, LISPs are converted from stuff like```clojure(+ 1 (* 3 8))```to```haskellList [Symbol "+", Integer 1, List [Symbol "*", Integer 3, Integer 8]]```
gollark: NUUUUUUU!

See also

References
  1. "Proposal to add LATIN SMALL LETTER GLOTTAL STOP to the UCS" (PDF). 2005-08-10. Retrieved 2013-11-04.
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