What ꭴ means
It writes the Cherokee syllable u. Cherokee uses a syllabary: each sign represents a whole syllable rather than one consonant or vowel. This one is a vowel-only syllable, with a sound close to the oo in English rule; u is the conventional Latin transliteration, not the character's identity.
Sequoyah developed the Cherokee syllabary between 1815 and 1821 to put the spoken language into writing. The Cherokee Phoenix, a newspaper, was printing it by 1828.
Why does Cherokee have lowercase letters?
The small forms let Cherokee text use lowercase. Cherokee type kept its syllabary characters at cap height for a long time, so Ꭴ was familiar in older printed text. The Cherokee lowercase forms let the script appear alongside cased writing without changing existing font layouts. Display still depends on a font that supports ꭴ.
Some printed Cherokee forms resemble Latin type because their shapes were adapted for movable-type printing. That is a visual resemblance, not shared alphabet membership.
In Cherokee writing, ꭴ is a syllable sign; in Latin-script notes, u is only a reading cue.
Do not replace ꭴ with Latin u in Cherokee spelling.
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Who writes ꭴ
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Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
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Questions people ask
1Why does ꭴ turn into Ꭴ?
It can happen during case folding. Cherokee case folding maps the small form to cap-height Ꭴ for compatibility, so software may output that form while keeping the same syllable.
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How to type or find ꭴ
- Search it as
- Cherokee syllabary · Cherokee lowercase · Cherokee small u · Cherokee keyboard · ꭴ vs Ꭴ
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ꭴ\AB74Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.