What ᷽ means
It marks epiglottal stridency on a vowel.
This is a rough, ringing voice quality made by narrowing and vibrating tissue near the entrance to the throat. In examples from !Xóõ, a Khoisan language, strident vowels are compared with plain vowels, breathy vowels, and vowels modified at the voice box (laryngealized) or throat (pharyngealized). In phonetic transcription—the precise writing of speech sounds—the mark follows the vowel it describes.
How did this mark enter phonetic writing?
It was proposed to record a difficult voice quality.
Linguists Peter Ladefoged and Ian Maddieson described this voice quality in their 1996 book The Sounds of the World's Languages; a 2007 Unicode proposal cited that account and described the mark as a Khoisan phonetic diacritic. The proposal paired this below mark with ͌, which sits above its base; ᷽ sits below.
Analysts of !Xóõ disagree on the phonation label: some treat stridency as its own type, while Traill describes it as breathy pharyngealization. Either way, the mark belongs to specialist phonetic transcription.
Specialist phonetic notation: it signals a sound description, not an equality relation.
Do not read ᷽ as ; it modifies the vowel beside it.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
2
Combining tilde below marks creaky voice in IPA; ᷽ marks stridency.
Related characters
1
Questions people ask
1Why does ᷽ look wrong by itself?
It needs a base vowel. In isolation, a font may show a dotted-circle placeholder; with weak mark support, it may appear misplaced or disappear.
More like this
10
How to type or find ᷽
- Search it as
- strident vowel · epiglottal · epiglottalized · phonetics · diacritic · phonation · khoisan · xóõ
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
᷽\1DFDCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.