Eng or engma (

capital Capital may refer to: Common uses * Capital city, a municipality of primary status ** List of national capital cities * Capital letter, an upper-case letter Economics and social sciences * Capital (economics), the durable produced goods used f ...

: Ŋ,

lowercase Letter case is the distinction between the Letter (alphabet), 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 lang ...

: ŋ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet, used to represent a voiced velar nasal (as in English ''sii'') in the written form of some languages and 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 ...

. In Washo, lower-case represents a typical sound, while upper-case represents a voiceless sound. This convention comes from Americanist phonetic notation.

History

The '' First Grammatical Treatise'', a 12th-century work on the phonology of the Old Icelandic language, uses a single grapheme for the eng sound, shaped like a g with a stroke . Alexander Gill the Elder uses an uppercase G with a hooked tail and a lowercase n with the hooked tail of a script g for the same sound in ''Logonomia Anglica'' in 1619. William Holder uses the letter in ''Elements of Speech: An Essay of Inquiry into the Natural Production of Letters'', published in 1669, but it was not printed as intended; he indicates in his errata that “there was intended a character for Ng, viz., n with a tail like that of g, which must be understood where the Printer has imitated it by n or y”.Robert W. Albright (1958)
''The International Phonetic Alphabet''
Its Backgrounds and Development, Indiana University. p. 11 It was later used in Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet, with its current phonetic value.

Appearance

Lowercase eng is derived from n, with the addition of a hook to the right leg, somewhat like that of j. Nowadays, the uppercase has two main variants: it can be based on the usual uppercase N, with a hook added (or "N-form"); or it can be an enlarged version of the lowercase (or "n-form"). The former is preferred in

Sami languages Acronyms * SAMI, ''Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange'', a closed-captioning format developed by Microsoft * Saudi Arabian Military Industries, a government-owned defence company * South African Malaria Initiative, a virtual expertise net ...

that use it, the latter in African languages, such as in Shona from 1931 to 1955, and several in west and central Africa currently. In Isaac Pitman’s

Phonotypic Alphabet The English Phonotypic Alphabet is a phonetic alphabet developed by Sir Isaac Pitman and Alexander John Ellis originally as an English language spelling reform. Although never gaining wide acceptance, elements of it were incorporated into the ...

, the uppercase had a reversed-N form. Early printers, lacking a specific glyph for eng, sometimes approximated it by rotating a capital G, or by substituting a Greek letter η (''eta'') before modified to present form for it (encoded in Unicode as the Latin letter n with long leg: Ƞ ƞ). File:Ngummi.png, An 1856 text in Gamilaraay, using a rotated capital G as a substitute for ŋ. File:Kiŋston Bildiŋz, near Bath Abbey - geograph.org.uk - 717317.jpg, Uppercase eng with the reversed-N-form on the Kingston Buildings in Bath, UK. File:Ŋ in William Ridley (1875), Kámilarói, and other Australian languages - p.4.png, Lowercase and uppercase eng with the reversed-N-form of the uppercase used in a 1875 Gamilaraay text. File:Ŋ in William Ridley (1875), Kámilarói, and other Australian languages - p.40.png, Eng used in a 1875 Gamilaraay text. File:Italic eng (with tail like double storey g).svg, Italic ŋ based on

double-storey g G, or g, is the seventh Letter (alphabet), letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the English alphabet, modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is English alphabet#Le ...

as used in Horatio Hale's ''Ethnography and Philology'' (1846). Nhooks.svg,

ᶇ The palatal hook () is a type of hook diacritic formerly used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent palatalized consonants. It is a small, leftwards-facing hook joined to the bottom-right side of a letter, and is distinguished from ...

 ŋ  ɲ  ɳ: four "n"-based IPA symbols for nasal sounds. File:Latin letter Eng (first variant of capital form).svg File:Latin letter Eng (second variant of capital form).svg File:Latin letter Eng (third variant of capital form).svg File:Latin letter Eng (fourth variant of capital form).svg File:Latin letter Eng (fifth variant of capital form).svg File:Latin letter Eng (sixth variant of capital form).svg

Pronunciation of words containing eng sound

In most languages eng is absent in the Latin alphabet but its sound can be present in the letter n in words. In English, it is heard in the potential digraphs nc (hard c), ng (hard g), nk, nq and nx, often at the end of words. For the pronunciation of ng with eng, it can be in words such as ''singer'' and ''hanged'' and when it is in final position or in words such as ''finger'' and ''angle''. In British English, n is pronounced eng in the prefixes en- and in- when they are followed by c, g and q, as in ''encroachment'', ''engagement'', ''enquiry'', ''incursion'', ''ingredient'', ''inquiry'' and others. In other English dialects, the n is pronounced instead. In many British dialects, the ng in ''strength'' and ''length'' is simply pronounced , with g a silent letter, and the ng is otherwise pronounced in those words.

Usage

Technical transcription

* Americanist phonetic notation, where it may also represent a uvular nasal. *Sometimes for the transcription of Australian Aboriginal languages *

* Uralic Phonetic Alphabet including *

Teuthonista Teuthonista is a phonetic transcription system used predominantly for the transcription of (High) German dialects. It is very similar to other Central European transcription systems from the early 20th century. The base characters are mostly bas ...

phonetic transcription system uses * Rheinische Dokumenta, a phonetic alphabet for many West Central German dialects,

Low Rhenish Meuse-Rhenish (German: ''Rheinmaasländisch'', Dutch: ''Maas-Rijnlands'', and French: ''francique rhéno-mosan'') is the modern term for literature written in the Middle Ages in the greater Meuse-Rhine area, in a literary language that is eff ...

, and few related languages.

Vernacular orthographies

Languages marked † no longer use eng, but formerly did. * African languages **

Bari Bari ( , ; nap, label= Barese, Bare ; lat, Barium) is the capital city of the Metropolitan City of Bari and of the Apulia region, on the Adriatic Sea, southern Italy. It is the second most important economic centre of mainland Southern Italy a ...

Bemba Bemba may refer to: * Bemba language (Chibemba), a Bantu language spoken in Zambia * Bemba people (AbaBemba), an ethnic group of central Africa * Jean-Pierre Bemba, the former vice-President of the Democratic Republic of Congo * A Caribbean drum, ...

** Dagbani ** Dinka **

Efik Efik may refer to: * Efik people, an ethnic group located primarily in southeastern Nigeria * Efik language, the language of the Efik people *Efik mythology, the mythological beliefs of the Efik people *Efik religion, the traditional religion of t ...

** Ewe ** Frafra ** Fula **

Ganda Ganda may refer to: Places * Ganda, Angola * Ganda, Tibet, China * Ganda, the ancient Latin name of Ghent, a city in Belgium Other uses * Baganda or Ganda, a people of Uganda ** Luganda or Ganda language, a language of Uganda * ''Ganda'' and "Ga ...

** Manding languages ** Nuer **

Shona language Shona (; sn, chiShona) is a Bantu language of the Shona people of Zimbabwe. It was codified by the colonial government in the 1950s. According to ''Ethnologue'', Shona, comprising the Zezuru, Korekore and Karanga dialects, is spoken by about 7 ...

† ** Songhay languages ** Wolof ** Zarma * American languages ** Inupiat ** Lakota ** O'odham * Austroasiatic languages ** Tonga *

Australian Aboriginal languages The Indigenous languages of Australia number in the hundreds, the precise number being quite uncertain, although there is a range of estimates from a minimum of around 250 (using the technical definition of 'language' as non-mutually intellig ...

** Bandjalang ** Yolngu *

Languages of China There are several hundred languages in China. The predominant language is Standard Chinese, which is based on central Mandarin, but there are hundreds of related Chinese languages, collectively known as ''Hanyu'' (, 'Han language'), that are spo ...

** Zhuang† (replaced by the digraph ''ng'' in 1986) **

Hanyu Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese for ...

† used ŋ as a short hand form of ng. *

** Inari Sami ** Lule Sami ** Northern Sami ** Ume Sami ** Skolt Sami ** Kildin Sami (during Latinisation in the 1930s) * Turkic languages during Latinisation in the 1930s used Ꞑ ꞑ, sometimes considered a variant of eng. **

Kazakh language The Kazakh or simply Qazaq (Latin: or , Cyrillic: or , Arabic Script: or , , ) is a Turkic language of the Kipchak branch spoken in Central Asia by Kazakhs. It is closely related to Nogai, Kyrgyz and Karakalpak. It is the official lan ...

† (2019 revision of the Latin alphabet; replaced with Ñ in the April 2021 proposal) * Mapuche language (Wirizüŋun script) * Kalam languages ** Kalam language

Computer encoding

Eng is encoded in Unicode as U+014A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ENG and U+014B LATIN SMALL LETTER ENG, part of the Latin Extended-A range. In ISO 8859-4 (Latin-4) it's located at BD (uppercase) and BF (lowercase). In African languages such as

, ''ng (with an apostrophe) is widely used as a substitute in media where eng is hard to reproduce.

References

External links

Practical Orthography of African Languages
*FileFormat.info – Fonts that suppor

an

{{Latin script, N , show diacritic = hook , show pairs = no Latin letters with diacritics Phonetic transcription symbols Latin-script letters