Cham letter nue

It marks syllable-initial n and carries Eastern Cham’s built-in vowel.

ꨗ marks the n sound at the start of a syllable. In Eastern Cham, it carries an inherent vowel written ɨ: a high, central vowel made with the tongue raised near the middle of the mouth and the lips unrounded. A following vowel sign can change the syllable; it is encoded after ꨗ even when a font displays it before or around the letter.

Cham writing drew on several traditions

Cham writing developed from early South Asian script traditions.

The earliest commonly cited Cham evidence is the Đông Yên Châu inscription, dated around the 4th century. Cham writing drew on Indic models related to Pallava, an early South Asian script. It served temple and religious records, royal announcements, and funerary statements.

Cham inscriptions from the 9th–15th centuries record linguistic change and contact. Leaf and paper manuscripts became central from the 16th century, carrying literary, documentary, and ritual texts. Eastern and Western Cham follow different conventions. In Western Cham communities, practice varies: Ka-Kha is an Indic script tradition, while Jawi is Cham written with an Arabic-based script, as described in a 2022 Unicode proposal. Khmer and Thai scripts share a more distant Indic and Pallava ancestry, but their characters are not interchangeable with Cham.