With the adoption of letters from 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 standardized representation ...

(IPA) in various national alphabets,

letter case Letter case is the distinction between the 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 languages. The writing ...

forms have been developed. This usually means capital (

uppercase Letter case is the distinction between the 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 languages. The writing ...

) forms were developed, but in the case of the glottal stop , both uppercase and lowercase are used. The adoption of IPA letters has been particularly notable in Sub-Saharan Africa, in languages such as

Hausa Hausa may refer to: * Hausa people, an ethnic group of West Africa * Hausa language, spoken in West Africa * Hausa Kingdoms, a historical collection of Hausa city-states * Hausa (horse) or Dongola horse, an African breed of riding horse See also ...

Fula Fula may refer to: *Fula people (or Fulani, Fulɓe) *Fula language (or Pulaar, Fulfulde, Fulani) **The Fula variety known as the Pulaar language **The Fula variety known as the Pular language **The Fula variety known as Maasina Fulfulde *Al-Fula ...

Akan Akan may refer to: People and languages *Akan people, an ethnic group in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire *Akan language, a language spoken by the Akan people *Kwa languages, a language group which includes Akan * Central Tano languages, a language group ...

Gbe languages The Gbe languages (pronounced ) form a cluster of about twenty related languages stretching across the area between eastern Ghana and western Nigeria. The total number of speakers of Gbe languages is between four and eight million. The most widel ...

Manding languages The Manding languages (sometimes spelt Manden) are a dialect continuum within the Mande language family spoken in West Africa. Varieties of Manding are generally considered (among native speakers) to be mutually intelligible – dependent on exp ...

, and

Lingala Lingala (Ngala) (Lingala: ''Lingála'') is a Bantu language spoken in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the northern half of the Republic of the Congo, in their capitals, Kinshasa and Brazzaville, and to a lesser degree in ...

. The most common are

open o Open o or Turned c (majuscule: Ɔ, minuscule: ɔ) is a letter of the extended Latin alphabet. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, it represents the open-mid back rounded vowel. It is used in the orthographies of many African languages usi ...

, open e , and eng , but several others are found. Kabiyé of northern

Togo Togo (), officially the Togolese Republic (french: République togolaise), is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Ghana to the west, Benin to the east and Burkina Faso to the north. It extends south to the Gulf of Guinea, where its c ...

, for example, has (or ), as in this newspaper headline: : ''MBƱ AJƐYA KIGBƐNDƱƱ ŊGBƐYƐ KEDIƔZAƔ SƆSƆƆ TƆM SE.'' Some of the IPA letters that were adopted into language orthographies have since become obsolete in the IPA itself.

Chart

Others letters are the graphic equivalent of IPA capitals, but are not identified with the IPA. Examples are ɟ Ɉ (the capital of ɉ), ʎ (⅄) (the capital of λ in Americanist usage; similarly ƛ ), ɹ ꓤ/Ꮧ.

References

{{IPA navigation International Phonetic Alphabet