Glottal stop (letter)


The character, 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, that use this letter for the glottal stop sound. The letter derives graphically from use of the apostrophe for glottal stop.

Graphic variants

Where 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, may be replaced by the digit .
In Unicode, four graphic variants of the glottal stop letter are available.
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,, which is probably the most common, the 6-shaped ʻokina of Hawaiian,, and the straight-apostrophe shaped saltillo of many languages of Mexico, which has the case forms.

Usage

Technical transcription

In Unicode 1.0, only the unicase and superscript variants were included. In version 4.1, an uppercase character was added, and the existing unicase character was redefined as its lowercase. Then, in version 5.0, 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.