Example in Polish: Example in Cayuga: Example in Dogrib: Example in Lithuanian: Example in Elfdalian: Example in Western Apache: lęk'e' created
Values
Nasalization
The use of the ogonek to indicate nasality is common in the transcription of the indigenous languages of the Americas. This usage originated in the orthographies created by Christian missionaries to transcribe these languages. Later, the practice was continued by Americanist anthropologists and linguists who still, to the present day, follow this convention in phonetic transcription. The ogonek is also used to indicate a nasalized vowel in Polish, academic transliteration of Old Church Slavonic, Navajo, Western Apache, Chiricahua, Tłįch Yatiì, Slavey, Dëne Sųłiné and Elfdalian. In Polish, ę is nasalized e; however, ą is nasalized o, not a, because of a vowel shift: ą, originally a long nasal a, turned into a short nasal o when the distinction in vowel quantity disappeared.
Length
In Lithuanian, the nosinė mark originally indicated vowel nasalization but around the late 17th century, nasal vowels gradually evolved into the corresponding long non-nasal vowels in most dialects. Thus, the mark is now de facto an indicator of vowel length. The mark also helps to distinguish different grammatical forms with otherwise the same written form, but are pronounced differently.
Lowered articulation
Between 1927 and 1989, the ogonek denoted lowering in vowels, and, since 1976, in consonants as well, in the International Phonetic Alphabet. While the obsolete diacritic has also been identified as the left half ring diacritic, many publications of the IPA used the ogonek. In Rheinische Dokumenta, it marks vowels that are more open than those denoted by their base letters Ää, Oo, Öö. In two cases, it can be combined with umlaut marks.
The E caudata, a symbol similar to an e with ogonek, evolved from a ligature of a and e in medieval scripts, in Latin and Irishpalaeography. The O caudata of Old Norse is used to write the open-mid back rounded vowel,. Medieval Nordic manuscripts show this 'hook' in both directions, in combination with several vowels. Despite this distinction, the term 'ogonek' is sometimes used in discussions of typesetting and encoding Norse texts, as o caudata is typographically identical to o with ogonek. Similarly, the E caudata was sometimes used to designate the vowel Norse or .
The ogonek is functionally equivalent to the cedilla and comma diacritic marks. If two of these three are used within the same orthography their respective use is restricted to certain classes of letters, i.e. usually the ogonek is used with vowels whereas the cedilla is applied to consonants. In handwritten text, the marks may even look the same.
Superscript ogonek
In Old Norse and Old Icelandic manuscripts, there is an over-hook or curl that may be considered a variant of the ogonek. It occurs on the letters a᷎ e᷎ i᷎ o᷎ ø᷎ u᷎.
Typographical notes
The ogonek should be almost the same size as a descender, and should not be confused with the cedilla or comma diacritics used in other languages.
Encoding
Because attaching an ogonek does not affect the shape of the base letter, Unicode covers it with a combining diacritic, U+0328. There are a number of precomposed legacy characters, but new ones are not being added to Unicode.
In LaTeX2e, macro \k will typeset a letter with ogonek, if it is supported by the font encoding, e.g. \k will typeset ą. However, \k rather places the diacritic "right-aligned" with the carrying e, suitably for Polish, while \textogonekcentered horizontally centers the diacritic with respect to the carrier, suitably for Native American Languages as well as for [|e caudata and o caudata]. So \textogonekcentered better fits the latter purposes. Actually, \k is defined to result in \textogonekcentered, and \k is defined to result in \textogonekcentered. The package TIPA, activated by using the command "\usepackage", offers a different way: "\textpolhook" will produce ą.
