Combining Tilde Below

In IPA, it marks creaky voice.

Creaky voice comes from vocal folds—the tissues in your voice box that vibrate to make sound—held close and vibrating irregularly. It gives the voice a tight, rough quality. The mark can modify a vowel or voiced consonant, as in a̰ or m̰.

In IPA, a tilde above the letter marks nasalization, so position changes the reading.

Where did the tilde below come from?

It developed as a mark in phonetic notation.

Medieval scribes put a tilde above writing to stand for omitted letters and save space. That older abbreviation does not establish the origin of the below-letter mark; the phonetic convention is documented at least by 1971.

The shape has had different readings across notation traditions. A 1968 source used the same below-tilde shape for vowels made with a narrowed throat. In a 2022 grammar of Bakairi, subscript tildes mark creaky vowels and are associated with emphasis or frustration in word forms that add a “bigger” or “smaller” meaning.

How do I type a tilde below a letter?

Place ̰ right after the letter it modifies.

Write it with a base character, as in a̰ or m̰. At the beginning of a string, it has no base to attach to, so its display is unreliable.

Praat's phonetic editor accepts o\~v; in the TIPA LaTeX package for phonetic symbols, use \textsubtilde{a} or \~*a. Font design affects how far it sits below the letter, especially with a descender or another mark below. Moving it above changes its IPA meaning.