Latin Small Letter Tone Two

ƨ marked tone two in an older alphabet for the Zhuang language. In a message, it may point to Zhuang spelling or language history, or preserve a character from a source. Its shape can be mistaken for unrelated letters.

Text symbol

What ƨ means

It marked tone two in an older Zhuang alphabet.

The 1957 alphabet for the Zhuang language used ƨ for tone two. Tone is a syllable’s pitch pattern; in Zhuang, it can distinguish words. The 1982 revision replaced the special tone letters with ordinary Latin letters.

Without linguistic context, ask what spelling was intended; ƨ is not an ordinary s or the number 2.

Historical and linguistic; it does not read as casual emphasis.

Don’t replace ƨ with s or 2 in a transcription; that changes the character.

Part of the collection

Zhuang Alphabet

Who writes ƨ

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Don't confuse it with

ᴤ

Latin Letter Voiced Laryngeal Spirant

Some typefaces make ƨ look like a reversed s; ᴤ is a separate Latin character used for a speech sound.

Coptic Small Letter Hori

ϩ belongs to the Coptic script; its similar outline does not make it the Zhuang tone letter ƨ.

ꙅ

Cyrillic Small Letter Reversed Dze

ꙅ is a Cyrillic letter with a reversed-s form; it is not the Zhuang tone letter ƨ.

Questions people ask

Why does ƨ show as a box on some devices?

Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.