What ͊ means
It marks a partial loss of a sound’s nasal quality. In m͊, the nasal m has some of its nasal resonance reduced but remains nasal; it has not become an ordinary b, made with airflow through the mouth. The Extended IPA (extIPA) extends the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a notation for speech sounds, to transcribe disordered speech in more detail.
The mark follows the letter it changes: m͊ and n͊ are examples, while ͊ alone is incomplete. An extIPA working group was established at the 1989 Kiel Convention; its recommendations appeared in print in 1990, and the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association adopted the chart in 1994.
Use ͊ for partial denasalization
Older extIPA charts called the mark “denasal” and also described it as “partial denasal.” In 2024, a published revision clarified the label as “partially denasal” and removed the fully denasal example. The ordinary IPA combining tilde ̃ marks nasalization; ͊ marks a partial loss of that nasal quality in extIPA.
Specialist notation: it signals phonetic transcription of observed speech, not everyday writing.
A lone ͊ has no base to modify; read it as incomplete notation.
Don't confuse it with
3Questions people ask
1Why does ͊ show with a dotted circle?
It is a display aid. A dotted circle may appear when ͊ is isolated or the renderer cannot attach it to a base; the circle is not part of the mark.
How to type ͊
͊\034ACodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.