Mid tone bar

It marks a steady middle pitch in a transcription.

Yuen Ren Chao's 1930 paper, A system of tone-letters, set out this five-level system. He designed the tone letters to show speech pitch accurately in a compact form that was easy to print: each turns a simplified pitch path into a line-and-bar shape.

The 1989 Kiel convention, a meeting that set IPA conventions, presented tone letters beside a separate five-level diacritic system. There, a combining macron ◌̄ over a vowel can mark mid-level tone; ˧ instead stands on its own in the transcription.

Why does ˧ join other tone bars?

Together, the bars trace a syllable's pitch movement.

Place tone bars side by side to show a rise or fall: ˧˥ moves from mid to high, while ˧˩ falls from mid to low. Unicode specifies rules for joining such contour sequences in fonts that support the shaping.

A University of Munich tone demonstration uses ˧˩ in a Thai example and shows this notation with Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese, Thai, the Ibibio language, and Yoruba. Each language has its own tone contrasts.

How do I type ˧?

Use Unicode hex input or an IPA input method.

App support varies; these platform routes follow Unicode's keyboard guidance as of 2026.

Key Curry's IPA input maps &m to ˧. A font with tone-letter shaping may join ˧˥ into one contour; another may show separate bars even though the encoded sequence is unchanged.