Ɀ (lowercase: ɀ) is a Latin letter z with a "swash tail" (encoded by

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, wh ...

, at codepoints U+2C7F for uppercase and U+0240 for lowercase) was used as a phonetic symbol by linguists studying

African languages The languages of Africa are divided into several major language families: * Niger–Congo or perhaps Atlantic–Congo languages (includes Bantu and non-Bantu, and possibly Mande and others) are spoken in West, Central, Southeast and Souther ...

to represent a voiced labio-alveolar fricative ().Proposal to encode two phonetic characters and two Shona characters
Lorna A. Priest, October 2, 2007. In 1931, it was adopted into the

orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and ...

Shona Shona often refers to: * Shona people, a Southern African people * Shona language, a Bantu language spoken by Shona people today Shona may also refer to: * ''Shona'' (album), 1994 album by New Zealand singer Shona Laing * Shona (given name) * S ...

for a 'whistled' ''z'', but it was dropped in 1955 due to the lack of the character on

typewriter A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an inked ribbon selectivel ...

s and fonts. Today the digraph zv is used. It is sometimes used to transcribe Toda's /d̪z̪/.

Notes and references

See also