What ߳ means
It extends the vowel reading of an N’Ko base. The N’Ko diacritic has no sound of its own; its base determines the result. ߎ߳ represents the French vowel in «tu»; ߋ߳ marks the weak e-like vowel in French «le»; ߊ߳ can represent Arabic ʿayn followed by «a», or a foreign open-a sound.
N’Ko was developed by Solomana Kanté in 1949 for Manding languages, with explicit vowel and tone marks. Its extended-vowel spellings accommodate sounds from languages including French and Arabic. Arabic literacy influenced N’Ko’s right-to-left writing direction; this mark belongs to N’Ko’s own spelling system.
How do I type this N’Ko mark?
Enter the N’Ko base first, then this combining mark. In the text, place ߳ after the letter it modifies; a Unicode-aware editor stores that order and the font stacks the dots over the base.
MediaWiki’s N’Ko transliteration layout maps % to ߳ in documentation from 2024; enter the base before the mark.
Unicode 17.0.0 notes that N’Ko marks may sit higher or look heavier than similar marks in other scripts. A font difference does not change which characters the sequence contains.
An orthographic mark for N’Ko extended-vowel spellings.
A bare ߳ has no fixed reading; it must follow its intended N’Ko base.
Don't confuse it with
3Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why are the dots floating without a letter?
They have no base to attach to. Check that the N’Ko letter comes before the mark and that your font supports N’Ko.
How to type ߳
߳\07F3Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.