Ā
Latin letter A with macron / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ā, lowercase ā, is a grapheme, a Latin A with a macron, used in several orthographies. Ā is used to denote a long A. Examples are the Baltic languages (e.g. Latvian), Polynesian languages, including Māori, some romanizations of Japanese, Persian, Pashto, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic (which represents a long A sound) and Arabic, and some Latin texts (especially for learners). In Romanised Mandarin Chinese (pinyin) it is used to represent A spoken with a level high tone (first tone). It is used in some orthography-based transcriptions of English to represent the diphthong /eɪ/ (see Vowel length § Traditional long and short vowels in English orthography).
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A with macron | |
---|---|
Ā ā | |
Usage | |
Writing system | Latin script |
Type | alphabetic |
Phonetic usage | |
Unicode codepoint | U+0100, U+0101 |
History | |
Development | |
Transliteration equivalents | आ, آ, 𑆄 |
Other | |
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. |
In the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration, Ā represents the open back unrounded vowel "आ", not to be confused with the similar Devanagari character for the mid central vowel, अ.
In languages other than Sanskrit,[1] Ā is sorted with other A's and is not considered a separate letter. The macron is only considered when sorting words that are otherwise identical. For example, in Māori, tāu (meaning your) comes after tau (meaning year), but before taumata (hill).