Devanagari High Spacing Dot

It marks different sound contrasts in several local spellings.

In Yohlmo, it marks a high-falling tone on the following suffix, the ending added to a word base. In Lhomi, it distinguishes tense or clearer vowels from lax, more relaxed ones. In Takale Kham, it marks high tone on a breathy vowel, pronounced with audible breath.

A 2006 proposal to encode the sign cites a 1985 Kham New Testament, an early dated printed record among the material it lists. That documents use by then, not when the sign was invented.

Why is ॱ a spacing sign?

It has its own spacing position instead of combining with a base letter.

Unlike anusvara and nukta, ॱ occupies a separate position; its spacing status affects how nearby Devanagari marks are shaped.

A 2016 study of Gamale Kham records a different convention: a raised dot at a syllable's start marks a glottal stop at its end, a brief catch in the throat. Rare high pitch is generally left unmarked. The study describes that spelling system as preliminary and says it had not been tested at wide scale.

How does ॱ change Devanagari shaping?

It starts a new writing cluster instead of joining the previous one.

After ra plus virama, the mark that suppresses the vowel, र्ॱक keeps the ra's halant visible instead of turning it into reph, the joined-ra form. Before ka plus the short-i vowel sign, ॱकि keeps ॱ first in the text sequence.

A Unicode character picker can enter it by searching for its name. A plain dot, anusvara, or nukta has different spacing or attachment behavior.