Ogonek

It marks nasal vowels in Polish; in Lithuanian, it marks vowel length and word-form distinctions.

Polish spelling uses the ogonek for nasal vowels—vowels pronounced with air flowing through the nose as well as the mouth. Lithuanian letters with an ogonek mark long vowels and grammatical distinctions; the older nasal value disappeared. Navajo spelling also uses the combining ogonek for nasalization.

One early trace of Polish nasal-vowel writing is a distinct letter in the Holy Cross Sermons, a collection of Polish religious sermons, around 1300. As printers sought a compact way to mark Polish nasal sounds, Zaborowski proposed hooked marks in an orthographic treatise—a book about spelling—in 1514–15. Polish printers distinguished the two nasal vowels from 1521. A survey of reproductions of old prints cited by Bunčić shows the tail form in a 1698 print. That earlier letter later split into modern ą and ę; it is not the standalone ˛.

How do I add an ogonek to a letter?

Use a precomposed letter or the combining ogonek, not ˛.

The attached form is the combining ogonek ̨: put it after the base letter. Under Unicode normalization, a + ̨ can become ą, and i + ̨ can become į. By contrast, ˛ is a spacing character: it occupies its own position instead of attaching to a letter.

For a second accent, put each combining mark after the same base; a + ̨ + acute accent can normalize to ą́. A font or text-layout system without support for the needed characters can place a combining mark incorrectly or leave it missing.