Modifier Letter Small C With Curl

It marks a brief hiss-like component attached to a neighboring sound. In phonetic writing, the raised form gives that hiss a secondary or transitional role rather than presenting it as the main consonant. One documented use marks a hiss-like release after a stop consonant, made by briefly blocking airflow before releasing it.

A Unicode encoding proposal cites printed c-curl examples in Burenhult's 2001 description of Jahai sound patterns and Kim's 2001 study of how stop consonants acquire a hiss-like release. The examples place the notation in two linguistic descriptions. Unicode recorded the character in 2005; that date marks its computer encoding, not the beginning of the notation.

How is ᶝ different from ɕ?

ᶝ modifies a sound; ɕ is the full-size IPA letter for a consonant. The IPA chart in its 2026 edition classifies ɕ as a voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative: a hiss made without vocal-cord vibration, with the tongue near the ridge behind the upper teeth and the hard palate. In transcription, ᶝ gives that quality a secondary or transitional role instead of naming an independent consonant.

Use ᶝ as text, not styled ɕ

ᶝ is its own text character. A rich-text superscript setting can make a full-size ɕ look similar, but removing the formatting restores ɕ and loses the distinction encoded by ᶝ. A 2020 IPA-backed Unicode proposal describes superscript letters as phonetic data and notes that they can be hard to read at ordinary sizes; their visible curl depends on the font.