Modifier Letter Raised Exclamation Mark

It marks Africanist downstep: the next high tone starts lower.

In a tone-marked transcription, ꜝ before a syllable means its high tone starts lower in pitch than the preceding high tone. The mark records pitch, not a writer's excitement.

An earlier notation appears in a 1916 Sechuana reader; Sechuana was an older English name for Setswana. Phonetics scholar Daniel Jones and Setswana writer Sol Plaatje worked on the reader. A historical account credits Jones's 1928 work on the language with introducing the raised exclamation form.

Is ꜝ the same as a normal exclamation mark?

No. It is a phonetic modifier, not sentence punctuation.

Africanist notation uses ꜝ for downstep, while the International Phonetic Alphabet recommends the raised down arrow ꜜ. A transcription may use the Africanist convention even though ꜜ is the IPA's preferred sign.

Rarely, in the IPA, ꜝ acts as a superscript click modifier for a weak or fleeting release or for click coloring. Unicode's 2024 annotation cross-references it with ǃ, the Latin letter for a retroflex click, and 𐞹, a separate modifier for a retroflex click.

Where does ꜝ go in a transcription?

Put it before the tone or syllable whose pitch is downstepped.

Read its position as an instruction about the next tonal target: in a sequence such as ꜝH, the following high tone begins below the preceding high tone. Published Setswana examples place the mark between tonal units, including across word boundaries; it is not a sentence-ending flourish.