Devanagari Letter Glottal Stop

It marks a brief glottal stop inside Limbu spellings written in Devanagari. Make the sound by briefly closing your throat, like the catch between the syllables in “uh-oh.” In documented Limbu examples, it can fall at the end of a syllable or word and distinguish words. One comparative dictionary study contrasts the Limbu forms transcribed sjaʔ, “uncooked rice,” and sja, “meat”; the final ʔ represents the glottal stop. It does not mark a question.

Why was ॽ added to Devanagari?

It gives the glottal stop a dedicated place in Devanagari-written Limbu. Devanagari served some Limbu publishing partly because many Limbu readers also know Nepali, which uses it. The encoding proposal submitted on 2003-06-02 says ॽ was already common in Limbu materials in Nepal and India. It cites a 1979 Limbu–Nepali–English dictionary, a 1995–1996 ritual-text sample, and a 1998 publication. Limbu's own Sirijonga script has the related sign ᤹ for glottalization.

The proposal preferred a Devanagari-specific character to inserting the Latin phonetic letter ʔ into Devanagari text, citing script shaping and script identity. A 2015 Yakkha grammar records other choices in Yakkha materials: ʔ or अ्. These are local alternatives, not variants of ॽ.

Why does ॽ have a top bar in some fonts?

The bar is a font variant, not a second character. Unicode documents a connecting-top-bar form, and as of 2026 the Annapurna SIL font demonstrates a no-bar style for the same character.