| Modifier letter apostrophe | |
|---|---|
| ʼ | |
 | |
| Usage | |
| Writing system | Cyrillic,Latin,Devanagari |
| Type | alphabetic |
| Sound values | [ʔ],[ʰ] |
| This article containsphonetic transcriptions in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA. For the distinction between[ ],/ / and ⟨ ⟩, seeIPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. | |
Themodifier letter apostrophe (ʼ) is a letter found inUnicode encoding, used primarily for variousglottal sounds. It was used for theapostrophe in early Unicode versions.
The letter apostrophe is encoded atU+02BC ʼMODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE, which is in theSpacing Modifier Letters Unicode block.
In Unicode code charts it looks identical to theU+2019 ’RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK,[1] but this is not true for all fonts. The primary difference between the letter apostrophe andU+2019 is that the letter apostrophe U+02BC has the UnicodeGeneral Category "Letter, modifier" (Lm), while U+2019 has the category "Punctuation, Final quote" (Pf).
In early Unicode (versions 1.0[2]–2.1.9[3]) U+02BC was preferred for the punctuation apostrophe in English. Since version 3.0.0,[4][5] however, U+2019 is preferred due to vast amounts of existing text written in character sets that unified the apostrophe and the single close quote characters. This does make searching for words with apostrophes in them somewhat harder.[6]
In theInternational Phonetic Alphabet, it is used to expressejective consonants, such as[kʼ] and[tʼ].
It denotes aglottal stop[ʔ] in orthographies of many languages, such asNenets (in Cyrillic script) and the artificialKlingon language.
In one version of theKildin Sami alphabet, it denotespreaspiration.[7]
In theUkrainian alphabet and in theBelarusian alphabet, U+02BC is used for the semi-letter 'apostrophe' (which plays a role similar to Russian⟨ъ⟩) in certain contexts, such as, for example, ininternationalized domain names where a punctuation mark would be disallowed.[8]
InBodo andDogri written inDevanagari, it marks high tone and low-rising tone on short vowels, respectively.
Italics indicate that the language no longer uses Cyrillic | |||||||||||||||||
| Cyrillic alphabets |
| ||||||||||||||||
| Cyrillization of | |||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||
