What ͋ means
It flags nasal airflow during a fricative sound.
A fricative is made by forcing air through a narrow opening; nasal escape means some airflow also passes through the nose. ExtIPA extends the International Phonetic Alphabet for transcribing atypical speech.
The consonant matters: the 2021 extIPA chart also shows ͋ on nasal consonants in its fricative-nasal row.
How did ͋ enter phonetic transcription?
It grew out of collective work on clinical transcription.
The Phonetic Representation of Disordered Speech (PRDS) group proposed extra notation in 1983. A subgroup formed at the 1989 Kiel Convention to work on disordered-speech transcription; the first extIPA recommendations appeared in a 1990 paper, and a 1994 chart recorded adoption by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (ICPLA).
These steps document an evolving system for recording atypical speech sounds that the standard IPA did not cover.
How do I type ͋ on a letter?
Enter a consonant first, then place ͋ immediately after it.
This is a nonspacing mark: it attaches to the preceding character. Alone, it may float or appear with a dotted circle added by the font or editor; the circle is not part of the mark.
Above-mark alignment depends on the font and software. Check the base-plus-mark sequence in the font used for the transcription.
A specialist extIPA mark for clinical phonetic transcription.
If it floats alone, check whether its base consonant was dropped.
Drift: In 2024, ICPLA adopted the vertical-tilde form as a clearer replacement because could be mistaken for in small print.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
2This mark denotes loss or partial loss of nasal resonance; ͋ marks fricative nasal escape.
This marks velopharyngeal friction, made at the passage between the back of the mouth and the nose; it is a different feature.
Questions people ask
1Is the dotted circle part of the mark?
No. Some fonts or editors add it as a placeholder when a combining mark has no base; it is not part of the character.
More like this
9
How to type or find ͋
- Also called
- nasal escape mark · fricative nasal escape
- Search it as
- extIPA · IPA · nasal escape · clinical transcription · phonetic diacritic · fricative
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
͋\034BCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.