Heng (letter)
Heng is a letter of the Latin alphabet, originating as a typographic ligature of h and j. It is used for a voiceless y-like sound in for example Dania transcription.
Heng is primarily used in modern Latin alphabets for various Indigenous Languages of the Caucasus to represent the glottal stop . Additionally, the digraphs 'Ꜧu ꜧu', 'Ꜧý ꜧý', and '' are used in some of the languages to represent , , and respectively.
'Ꜧ ꜧ' is used some modern Latin typography for nearly all of the Northeast Caucasian and Northwest Caucasian languages, as well as Mingrelian and Svan of the Kartvelian family. 'Ꜧu ꜧu' is used in some Latin transcriptions of Adyghe and Kabardian of the Northwest Caucasian family, 'Ꜧý ꜧý' is used only in the Abzakh dialect of Adyghe, and 'Ꜧꬶ ꜧꬶ' is used in phonologically precise Latin transcriptions to show the more common realisation of the epiglottal stop in Chechen of the Northeast Caucasian family.
It was used word-finally in early transcriptions of Mayan languages, where it may have represented a uvular fricative.
It is sometimes used to write Judeo-Tat.
It has been occasionally used by phonologists to represent a hypothetical phoneme in English, which includes both and as its allophones, to illustrate the limited usefulness of minimal pairs to distinguish phonemes. Normally and are considered separate phonemes in English, even though a minimal pair for them cannot be constructed, due to their complementary distribution.
It is also used in Bantu linguistics to indicate a voiced alveolar lateral fricative.
Both and are encoded in Unicode block Latin Extended-D.Transcription
A variant form,, is encoded as part of the IPA Extensions Block. It is used to represent the voiceless palatal-velar fricative in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
The Teuthonista phonetic transcription system uses.
