Reversed glottal stop

For the sound transcribed by this letter in the IPA, see voiced pharyngeal fricative.

The reversed glottal stop, ⟨ʕ⟩ (majuscule: ꟎, minuscule: ꟏, superscript: ˤ), is a letter of the Latin script. It is used to denote a voiced pharyngeal fricative and similar sounds, either as a caseless letter as in the International Phonetic Alphabet, or as a cased pair in the Pilagá alphabet. Like the glottal stop ⟨ʔ⟩, which is derived graphically from an apostrophe, it derives from the turned comma ⟨ʻ⟩, or strictly its round form ⟨ʿ⟩.

Reversed glottal stop
ʕ ꟎ ꟏
Usage
Writing system	Latin script
Type	Alphabetic
Language of origin	caising pair: Pilagá
Sound values	[ʕ]
In Unicode	U+0295, U+A7CE, U+A7CF
Alphabetical position	7
History
Development	◌̓ ʔ ʕ ʕ ꟎ ꟏
Time period	caseless: 1928-present caising pair: 1996-present
Sisters	ʔ Ɂ ɂ
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.

Graphic variants

In Unicode, five graphic variants of the reversed glottal stop are available.

• Caseless U+0295 ʕ LATIN LETTER PHARYNGEAL VOICED FRICATIVE, used in phonetic transcriptions and some orthographies.
• Casing pair U+A7CE ꟎ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER PHARYNGEAL VOICED FRICATIVE and U+A7CF ꟏ LATIN SMALL LETTER PHARYNGEAL VOICED FRICATIVE, used in Pilagá orthography.
• Superscript U+02C1 ˁ MODIFIER LETTER REVERSED GLOTTAL STOP, graphical alternative of ⟨ʿ⟩.
• Superscript U+02E4 ˤ MODIFIER LETTER SMALL REVERSED GLOTTAL STOP, technical superscript of caseless ⟨ʕ⟩.

Usage

The phonetic symbol ʕ became part of the International Phonetic Alphabet in 1928, replacing the small capital Q ⟨ꞯ⟩ used in the 1912 Principles, to transcribe the voiced pharyngeal fricative. Like the glottal stop letter, it has since been borrowed into Americanist phonetic notation and the transliteration of languages such as Arabic (see Romanization of Arabic).

The reversed glottal stop is used as a caseless letter in several orthographies: Okanagan and Columbia-Moses in the United States, Ditinaht, Nuuchahnulth, St'at'imcets and Thompson in Canada. In Ethiopia, it is used by some authors in Tsamai^[1] while others use ⟨/⟩, and was used in Ale^[2] but has been replaced by ⟨q⟩.^[3]

The bicameral form of the letter (majuscule: ꟎, minuscule: ꟏) is used in the Pilagá language to represent the voiced pharyngeal fricative [ʕ]. It was created in 1996 after much deliberation throughout the Pilagá community, along with the rest of the Pilagá alphabet. In Pilagá, it is rendered similarly to the gelded reversed question mark .^[4]

Appearance in computer fonts

The caseless U+0295 ʕ LATIN LETTER PHARYNGEAL VOICED FRICATIVE has been in Unicode since version 1.1 and has been available in previous phonetic encodings as well.

The casing pair ꟎ and ꟏ were added to Unicode in Latin Extended-D on September 9th, 2025, with the release of Unicode 17.0.0.^[5] Due to its infrequent usage and recent introduction into Unicode, few fonts have created a glyph for it (such as GNU Unifont), and the character may appear rendered as a box to many users. ꟎ and ꟏ occupy codepoints U+A7CE ꟎ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER PHARYNGEAL VOICED FRICATIVE and U+A7CF ꟏ LATIN SMALL LETTER PHARYNGEAL VOICED FRICATIVE respectively.

See also

• Glottal stop (letter)
• Voiced pharyngeal fricative