What ᰤ means
It adds a y-like glide after a base consonant.
The medial mark belongs to the same syllable; it is not a standalone way to write the letter ya. Lepcha is a language with its own script, and its spelling places this mark after the base consonant in text order.
Lepcha’s written tradition is described as eighteenth-century, and Unicode says the script is thought to have emerged around 1720. Traditional accounts credit the script to either Thikúng Mensalóng or Lhatsun Chenpo; the accounts differ.
Why is it called subjoined ya?
The name follows Tibetan terminology, not Lepcha placement.
In Tibetan, a comparable subjoined ya joins below its base. Lepcha adapted Tibetan letterforms, reorienting vertical source forms for left-to-right writing; here, ᰤ is entered after its base consonant and can appear to its right before shaping joins the pair into one form.
When a syllable has both medial ra and ya, ra comes first; together they form -rya before the vowel sign and any final consonant sign.
Read ᰤ as part of a Lepcha syllable: it is a spelling component, not a syllable by itself.
Do not use bare ᰤ as the standalone Lepcha letter ya.
Part of the collection
Who writes ᰤ
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Related characters
2
Questions people ask
1Why does ᰤ look misplaced after I type it?
It may be a shaping issue: a font or text engine may not join the medial mark and its base as expected on screen.
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How to type or find ᰤ
- Search it as
- Lepcha medial ya · -ya · subjoined ya · Lepcha ya · -rya · SIL Lepcha keyboard
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ᰤ\1C24Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.