Cyrillic Small Letter En With Left Hook

It represents the palatal nasal /ɲ/, roughly “ny” in “onion.”

ԩ is the lowercase form of Ԩ. The letter belongs to Uilta (also called Orok), a language of Sakhalin; it is part of the spelling system developed for writing that language.

Why was ԩ created?

It gives Uilta a separate letter for /ɲ/.

Linguist Jiro Ikegami and Uilta collaborators developed a Cyrillic-based writing system for the language. The Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Linguistics approved the project in July 1993. The alphabet assigns separate letters to distinct sounds, including /ɲ/.

Accounts point to a Uilta primer from 2007 and date the first primer to early 2008. The pair Ԩ/ԩ was proposed for Unicode in 2011.

Why does the hook direction matter?

ԩ marks /ɲ/; the right-hook ӈ marks /ŋ/.

The sounds differ: /ɲ/ is like the “ny” in “onion,” while /ŋ/ is the sound at the end of “sing.” The Latin letter Ɲ is used as a transcription for ԩ’s sound; it is not an interchangeable encoding of the Cyrillic letter.

By 2020, a Uilta language atlas described natural transmission as having stopped and noted occasional use in research, school materials, and national celebrations. A 2022 primer kept nearly the same alphabet while changing some other letters.