Small Reversed Glottal Stop Modifier

It marks the sound before it as pharyngealized.

In plain terms, the tongue narrows the passage at the back of the throat. In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the mark comes after the sound it modifies: sˤ means an s with that added narrowing. Move ˤ and a different sound gets the mark. The history of this notation reaches back to 1926, when an IPA chart listed ʕ among pharyngeal fricatives. A 1989 IPA convention approved a postposed mark for pharyngealization; its tilde could still mark either velarization (a narrowing near the soft palate) or pharyngealization.

Arabic phonetics often calls related consonants emphatic. That label covers different tongue constrictions: some dialect descriptions call them velarized, and a 2017 MRI study found different constriction locations and effects on neighboring sounds for pharyngeal and pharyngealized consonants in Saudi, Lebanese, and Jordanian Arabic.

Is ˤ the same as ʕ?

No: ʕ is a consonant; ˤ modifies the sound before it.

The full-size IPA letter ʕ represents a pharyngeal consonant, including the sound associated with Arabic letter ع. ˤ instead follows another sound and marks it as pharyngealized.

ˁ is a close-looking alternative that some phonetic resources use for pharyngealization. Unicode identifies it as a typographical alternate of ʿ, and resources have chosen ˁ and ˤ differently. Keep the selected character when exchanging a transcription.

How do I type ˤ?

Use a Unicode IPA input method or a specialist layout.

On the QWERTY DB multilingual layout, AltGr + F, -, p produces ˤ; that sequence is layout-specific. In generated text, use \u02E4 in JSON or JavaScript and ˤ in HTML.