The colon alphabetic letter is used in a number of languages and phonetic transcription systems, for
vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived or actual length (phonetics), duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels.
On one hand, many ...
in
Americanist Phonetic Notation
Americanist phonetic notation, also known as the North American Phonetic Alphabet (NAPA), the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet or the American Phonetic Alphabet (APA), is a system of phonetic notation originally developed by European and American ...
, for the vowels and in a number of languages of Papua New Guinea, and for grammatical
tone
Tone may refer to:
Visual arts and color-related
* Tone (color theory), a mix of tint and shade, in painting and color theory
* Tone (color), the lightness or brightness (as well as darkness) of a color
* Toning (coin), color change in coins
* ...
in several languages of Africa. 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
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
it has been assigned the code , which behaves like a letter rather than a punctuation mark in electronic texts. In practice, however, an
ASCII
ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...
colon is frequently used for the letter ().
In
Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
and
macOS
macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...
, the letter colon can be used to emulate the punctuation colon in file names, where the punctuation colon is a reserved character that cannot be used.
Alphabetic letter
Several of the
Native American languages
The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas Pre-Columbian era, before the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples. Over a thousand of these languages are still used today, while m ...
of North America use the colon to indicate vowel length.
Zuni is one. Other languages include
Hupa of California,
Oʼodham of Arizona,
Sayula Popoluca 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
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), also known as the DR Congo, Congo-Kinshasa, or simply the Congo (the last ambiguously also referring to the neighbouring Republic of the Congo), is a country in Central Africa. By land area, it is t ...
, in
Sabaot in
Kenya
Kenya, officially the Republic of Kenya, is a country located in East Africa. With an estimated population of more than 52.4 million as of mid-2024, Kenya is the 27th-most-populous country in the world and the 7th most populous in Africa. ...
, and 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 Guinea–Liberia border, its north, Ivory Coast to Ivory Coast–Lib ...
. It is used for the vowels and in several languages of
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean n ...
:
Erima,
Gizra,
Go꞉bosi,
Gwahatike,
Kaluli,
Kamula,
Kasua,
Kuni-Boazi and
Zimakani.
Phonetic symbol
In
Americanist phonetic notation
Americanist phonetic notation, also known as the North American Phonetic Alphabet (NAPA), the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet or the American Phonetic Alphabet (APA), is a system of phonetic notation originally developed by European and American ...
, 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 notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...
, a triangular or trapezoidal colon-like letter is used to indicate that the preceding
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...
or
vowel is long. Its form is that of two triangles or trapezoids 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
Finno-Ugric transcription (FUT) or the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA) is a phonetic transcription or notational system used predominantly for the transcription and reconstruction of Uralic languages. It was first published in 1901 by Eemil Nesto ...
uses .
References
{{Latin script
Latin-script letters