Ñ
Letter of the modern Latin alphabet / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Ñ, or ñ (Spanish: eñe, [ˈeɲe] ⓘ), is a letter of the modern Latin alphabet, formed by placing a tilde (also referred to as a virgulilla in Spanish, in order to differentiate it from other diacritics, which are also called tildes) on top of an upper- or lower-case ⟨n⟩.[1] It became part of the Spanish alphabet in the eighteenth century when it was first formally defined, but it has subsequently been used in other languages, such as Galician, Asturian, the Aragonese Grafía de Uesca, Basque, Chavacano, some Philippine languages (especially Filipino and Bisayan), Chamorro, Guarani, Quechua, Mapudungun, Mandinka, Papiamento, and Tetum alphabets, as well as in Latin transliteration of Tocharian and many Indian languages, where it represents [ɲ] or [nʲ]. It represents [ŋ] in Crimean Tatar, Kazakh, ALA-LC romanization for Turkic languages, the Common Turkic Alphabet, Nauruan and romanized Quenya. In Breton and in Rohingya, it denotes nasalization of the preceding vowel.
Eñe | |
---|---|
Ñ ñ | |
Usage | |
Writing system | Latin script |
Type | Alphabetic |
Language of origin | Spanish language |
Phonetic usage | [ɲ] [ŋ] |
Unicode codepoint | U+00D1, U+00F1 |
Alphabetical position | 15 |
History | |
Development | |
Time period | ~1000 to present |
Transliteration equivalents | gn (French, Italian) Nh (Portuguese, Occitan, Vietnamese) ny (Catalan, Aragonese, Hungarian, Indonesian, Malay) |
Other | |
Writing direction | Left-to-Right |
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. |
Unlike many other letters that use diacritics (such as ⟨ü⟩ in Catalan and Spanish and ⟨ç⟩ in Catalan, French, Portuguese and sometimes in Spanish), ⟨ñ⟩ in Spanish, Galician, Basque, Asturian, Leonese, Guarani and Filipino is considered a letter in its own right, has its own name (Spanish: eñe), and its own place in the alphabet (after ⟨n⟩). Historically, it came from a superscript abbreviation for a doubled ⟨n⟩. Its alphabetical independence is similar to the Germanic ⟨w⟩, which came from a doubled ⟨v⟩.