What ꜛ means
It marks an upstep: the next tone-marked unit starts higher.
Put it before the syllable or word whose pitch level is higher than the one before it. It marks a change in pitch register, not a louder voice.
The notation predates this Unicode character: a 2005 encoding proposal cites the 1999 IPA Handbook and a 1999 sample by Snider. The proposal distinguishes this raised half-height tone mark from full-height arrows used for IPA airflow; ꜛ entered Unicode in 2008.
Is ꜛ the same as ↑?
No: ꜛ marks tonal upstep; full-height ↑ has a different IPA use.
The difference is functional: the raised mark indicates a pitch change, while IPA uses full-height arrows for speech airflow.
In Drubea and Numèè, two languages of New Caledonia, ꜛ can mark a rise just before downstep—a step down in pitch register—or a rise at the end of a phrase. Read the surrounding transcription to see which use applies.
How do I type ꜛ?
Praat accepts \|u; TIPA-based LaTeX uses \textupstep.
Enter \|u in Praat’s phonetic input. In LaTeX documents using TIPA notation, enter \textupstep.
A specialist mark in phonetics and language documentation for a rise in pitch register.
Do not replace it with ↑: that full-height arrow marks a different IPA feature.
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsDon't confuse it with
2Combination ideas
2Questions people ask
1Why does ꜛ 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.
How to type ꜛ
ꜛ\A71BCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.