Buginese Letter Ngka

Use a keyboard that supports Lontara.

A font must include Buginese letters for this to display. When an e vowel mark is used, script-aware shaping places it to the left even though its stored order follows the consonant.

What does ᨃ mean?

ᨃ writes ngka: the “ng” sound in “sing” followed by k.

Paper was available in South Sulawesi by 1500. Older palm-leaf forms came before the standardized inventory of the mid-19th century. A Bugis inscription in Brunei has uncertain dating: 1855–56 is proposed, with the mid-18th-century also suggested.

Lontara served for genealogies, chronicles, diaries, treaty records, and religious publications. It belongs to the Brahmic script family, a broad group of writing systems found across South and Southeast Asia. The separate Makassarese Bird Script was another South Sulawesi tradition used in the 17th century, and Lontara forms were adapted for Bima and Ende. By 2016, newer Bugis print usually used Latin-letter spellings. Older manuscripts sometimes used the plain consonant where later print used ᨃ, leaving the distinction to readers and context while the sound remained the same.

Can someone send ᨃ as a message?

Alone, it is a syllable fragment, not a full message.

A lone ᨃ gives too little context to identify a whole Bugis word or a sender’s intent; ask for the surrounding word. On 30 January 1999, an observer in Jakarta’s harbor read a Lontara ship name as a possible public expression of Bugis identity. That example concerns Lontara writing as a cultural marker, not this letter sent by itself.