ん, in

hiragana is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' literally means "flowing" or "simple" kana ("simple" originally as contras ...

or ン in

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived f ...

, is one of the Japanese

kana The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters ( kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most ...

, which each represent one mora. ん is the only kana that does not end in a

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...

sound (although in certain cases the vowel ending of kana, such as す, is unpronounced). The kana for ''mu'', む/ム, was originally used for the ''n'' sound as well, while ん was originally a hentaigana used for both ''n'' and ''mu''. In the 1900

Japanese script reform The Japanese script reform is the attempt to correlate standard spoken Japanese with the written word, which began during the Meiji period. This issue is known in Japan as the . The reforms led to the development of the modern Japanese written ...

s, hentaigana were officially declared obsolete and ん was officially declared a kana to represent the n sound. In addition to being the only kana not ending with a vowel sound, it is also the only kana that does not begin any words in standard Japanese (other than foreign loan words such as " Ngorongoro", which is transcribed as ンゴロンゴロ) (see

Shiritori Shiritori (; ) is a Japanese word game in which the players are required to say a word which begins with the final ''kana'' of the previous word. No distinction is made between ''hiragana'', ''katakana'', and ''kanji''. "Shiritori" literally means ...

). Some regional dialects of Japanese feature words beginning with ん, as do the

Ryukyuan languages The , also Lewchewan or Luchuan (), are the indigenous languages of the Ryukyu Islands, the southernmost part of the Japanese archipelago. Along with the Japanese language and the Hachijō language, they make up the Japonic language family. ...

(which are usually written in the Japanese writing system), in which words starting with ン are common, such as the Okinawan word for

miso is a traditional Japanese seasoning. It is a thick paste produced by fermenting soybeans with salt and ''kōji'' (the fungus '' Aspergillus oryzae'') and sometimes rice, barley, seaweed, or other ingredients. It is used for sauces and ...

, ''nnsu'' (transcribed as ンース). In the

Ainu language Ainu (, ), or more precisely Hokkaido Ainu, is a language spoken by a few elderly members of the Ainu people on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It is a member of the Ainu language family, itself considered a language family isolate ...

, ン is interchangeable with the small katakana ㇴ as a final n. The kana is followed by an

apostrophe The apostrophe ( or ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for two basic purposes: * The marking of the omission of one ...

in some systems of

transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus ''trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or L ...

whenever it precedes a

or a y- kana, so as to prevent confusion with other kana. However, like every other kana besides ''

yōon The , also written as ''yōon'', is a feature of the Japanese language in which a mora is formed with an added sound, i.e., palatalized, or (more rarely in the modern language) with an added sound, i.e. labialized. ''Yōon'' are represented i ...

'', it represents an entire mora, so its pronunciation is, in practice, as close to "nn" as "n". The pronunciation can also change depending on what sounds surround it. These are a few of the ways it can change: * (before ''n'', ''t'', ''d'', ''r'', ''ts'', ''z'', ''ch'' and ''j'' ) * (before ''m'', ''p'' and ''b'' ) * (before ''k'' and ''g'') * (at the end of utterances) * (before vowels, palatal approximants (''y''), consonants ''h'', ''f'', ''s'', ''sh'' and ''w'') * (after the vowel ''i'' if another vowel, palatal approximant or consonant ''f'', ''s'', ''sh'', ''h'' or ''w'' follows.)

Stroke order

Other communicative representations

* Full Braille representation * Computer encodings N is the only Katakana without a circled form in

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

References

* {{reflist Specific kana