Kra (letter)

"ĸ" redirects here; not to be confused with к.

Kra (uppercase: Kʼ, lowercase: ĸ) is a glyph formerly used to write the Kalaallisut language (also known as Greenlandic) of Greenland and is now only found in Inuttitut, a distinct Inuktitut dialect. It is visually similar to a Latin small capital letter K, a Greek letter Kappa: κ, or a Cyrillic small letter Ka: к.

Kra (letter)
Kʼ ĸ
Usage
Type	alphabetic
Language of origin	Inuttitut
Sound values	[q]
In Unicode	U+0138
History
Transliterations	Q q
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.

ĸ in a Greenlandic–Danish dictionary from 1926

"Avangnâmioĸ" in all-caps, title of Greenlandic periodical from 1957, with the uppercase of ĸ as Kʼ.

Kra, small caps K (if present), and Cyrillic small к, using the fonts: Arial, Times New Roman, Doulos SIL, Cambria, Linux Libertine, Andron Mega Corpus, Adobe Minion Pro, Courier New, and Consolas. Second row: italics, using the same fonts.

It is used to denote the sound written as [q] in the International Phonetic Alphabet (the voiceless uvular plosive). For collation purposes, it is therefore considered to be a type of q, rather than a type of k, and should sort near q.

Its Unicode code point for the lowercase form is U+0138 ĸ LATIN SMALL LETTER KRA (ĸ). If this is unavailable, q is substituted. The letter can be capitalized as Kʼ, but it is not encoded separately as a single letter because it is very similar to the Latin capital letter K followed by an apostrophe,^[1][2] preferably the modifier letter apostrophe, U+02BC ʼ MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE.^[3] However, this case mapping is not implemented in Unicode.

In 1973, a spelling reform replaced kra in Greenlandic with the Latin small letter q (and its capital form, with the Latin capital letter Q).^[4]