The colon alphabetic letter is used in a number of languages and phonetic transcription systems, generally for
vowel length or
tone.
It resembles but differs from the
colon punctuation mark, . In some fonts, the two dots are placed a bit closer together than those of the punctuation colon so that the two characters are visually distinct.
In
Unicode it has been assigned the code , which behaves like a letter rather than a punctuation mark in electronic texts. In practice, however, an
ASCII colon is frequently used for the letter.
In
Windows and
macOS, the letter colon can be used to emulate the punctuation colon in file names, where the punctuation colon is a
reserved character
A filename or file name is a name used to uniquely identify a computer file in a directory structure. Different file systems impose different restrictions on filename lengths.
A filename may (depending on the file system) include:
* name &ndas ...
that cannot be used.
Alphabetic letter
Several of the
Native American languages of North America use the colon to indicate vowel length.
Zuni is one. Other languages include
Hupa
Hupa (Yurok language term: Huep'oola' / Huep'oolaa = "Hupa people") are a Native American people of the Athabaskan-speaking ethnolinguistic group in northwestern California. Their endonym is Natinixwe, also spelled Natinook-wa, meaning "Peopl ...
of California,
Oʼodham of Arizona,
Sayula Popoluca
Sayula Popoluca, also called Sayultec, is a Mixe language spoken by around 5,000 indigenous people in and around the town of Sayula de Alemán in the southern part of the state of Veracruz, Mexico. Almost all published research on the language ha ...
of Mexico and
Mohawk of Ontario. Still others use a half colon (just the top dot of the colon, or a
middot, ). Both conventions derive from Americanist phonetic notation (below).
The colon is used as a grammatical tone letter in
Budu in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, in
Sabaot in
Kenya, in some
Grebo in
Liberia
Liberia (), officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country on the West African coast. It is bordered by Sierra Leone to Liberia–Sierra Leone border, its northwest, Guinea to its north, Ivory Coast to its east, and the Atlantic Ocean ...
, and in several languages of
Papua New Guinea:
Erima,
Gizra
Gizrra, or Toga, is a Papuan language of New Guinea
New Guinea (; Hiri Motu
Hiri Motu, also known as Police Motu, Pidgin Motu, or just Hiri, is a language of Papua New Guinea, which is spoken in surrounding areas of Port Moresby (Capit ...
,
Go꞉bosi,
Gwahatike,
Kaluli,
Kamula,
Kasua,
Kuni-Boazi and
Zimakani.
Phonetic symbol
In
Americanist phonetic notation, a colon may be used to indicate vowel length. This convention is somewhat less common than the half-colon.
In the
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...
, a special triangular colon-like letter is used to indicate that the preceding
consonant or
vowel is long. Its form is that of two triangles pointing toward each other rather than the two dots of Americanist notation. It is available in Unicode as .
If the upper triangle is used without the lower one (), it designates a
half-long vowel or consonant.
The
Uralic Phonetic Alphabet uses .
References
Latin-script letters
{{Writingsystem-stub