N-apostrophe (ŉ) is a

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

code point for the

Afrikaans Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans gra ...

language of

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countri ...

and

Namibia Namibia (, ), officially the Republic of Namibia, is a country in Southern Africa. Its western border is the Atlantic Ocean. It shares land borders with Zambia and Angola to the north, Botswana to the east and South Africa to the south and ea ...

. The code point is currently deprecated, and the Unicode standard recommends that a sequence of an apostrophe followed by ''n'' be used instead, as the use of deprecated characters such as ''ŉ'' is "strongly discouraged", despite being required for

CP853 Code page 853 (CCSID 853) (also known as CP 853 or IBM 00853) is a code page used under DOS to write Turkish, Maltese, and Esperanto. It includes all characters from ISO 8859-3. Character set Only the second half is shown, codes 0-127 are the same ...

compatibility. In fact, it was removed from the

Charis SIL Charis SIL is a transitional serif typeface developed by SIL International based on Bitstream Charter, one of the first fonts designed for laser printers. The font offers four family members: roman, bold, italic, and bold italic. Its design goal ...

and

Doulos SIL Doulos SIL (Ancient Greek for "slave") is a serif typeface developed by SIL International, very similar to Times or Times New Roman. Unlike Times New Roman, Doulos only has a single face, Regular. The goal of its design according to the SIL In ...

fonts. It is however in quite general use in the Afrikaans versions of Facebook and other publications, probably to avoid the tendency of auto-correction (designed for English quotation marks) to turn a typed ′n into ‘n which is incorrect but common.

Grammar

The letter is the

indefinite article An article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech. In English, both "the" and "a(n)" ar ...

of Afrikaans, and is pronounced as a

schwa In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (, rarely or ; sometimes spelled shwa) is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol , placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English and some other languages, it rep ...

. The symbol itself came about as a contraction of its Dutch equivalent ' meaning "one" (just as English ''an'' comes from

Anglo-Saxon The Anglo-Saxons were a Cultural identity, cultural group who inhabited England in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their origins to settlers who came to Britain from mainland Europe in the 5th century. However, the ethnogenesis of the Anglo- ...

''ān'', also meaning "one"). :Dit is ŉ boom. : :It is a tree. When ŉ comes before a vowel, it may be pronounced the same as English ''an''. This pronunciation is not common at all and may be limited to older speakers – in general, the pronunciation mentioned above is used in all cases. :Dit is ŉ appel. : (also ) :This is an apple. In Afrikaans, ŉ is never capitalised in standard texts. Instead, the first letter of the following word is capitalised. :ŉ Mens is hier. :A person is here. An exception to this rule is in newspaper headlines, or sentences and phrases where all the letters are capitalised. :’N NASIONALE NOODTOESTAND :A NATIONAL EMERGENCY SITUATION

Miscellaneous

The upper case, or

majuscule Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...

form has never been included in any international keyboards. Therefore, it is decomposable by simply combining ʼ (U+02BC) and N. 〔ʼN〕 It is also a legacy compatibility character for the ISO/IEC 6937 and

text encodings.

References

{{reflist Latin letters with diacritics Afrikaans words and phrases

Grammar

Miscellaneous

See also

References