U+0203 "ȃ" Latin Small Letter A with Inverted Breve Unicode Character
U+0203 "ȃ" Latin Small Letter A with Inverted Breve is a specialized glyph used primarily in phonetic transcription, particularly within the International Phonetic Alphabet, where the inverted breve (a curved diacritic placed above the letter) indicates a falling-rising tone or a specific contour in tonal languages. It belongs to the Latin Extended-B block and is a composite of the lowercase letter "a" combined with the inverted breve diacritic, making it distinct from the standard "a" or its other accented forms. This character is rarely encountered in everyday text but serves an important role in linguistic documentation and analysis for accurately representing nuanced pronunciation patterns in languages such as certain Slavic or African tongues.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+0203 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Latin Small Letter A with Inverted Breve |
| Block | Latin Extended-B |
| General Category | Lowercase Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
| Decomposition Type | Canonical |
| Decomposition Mapping | "a" U+0061 Latin Small Letter A "̑" U+0311 Combining Inverted Breve |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ȃ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ȃ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xC8 0x83 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x0203 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00000203 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u0203 |
Unicode Properties
| NFC Quick Check | Yes |
| NFKC Quick Check | Yes |
| Numeric Type | None |
| Numeric Value | NaN |
| Line Break | Alphabetic |
| Lowercase | Yes |
| Simple Uppercase Code Point | "Ȃ" U+0202 Latin Capital Letter A with Inverted Breve |
| Simple Titlecase Code Point | "Ȃ" U+0202 Latin Capital Letter A with Inverted Breve |
| Uppercase Code Point | "Ȃ" U+0202 Latin Capital Letter A with Inverted Breve |
| Titlecase Code Point | "Ȃ" U+0202 Latin Capital Letter A with Inverted Breve |
| Cased | Yes |
| Changes When Casemapped | Yes |
| Changes When Titlecased | Yes |
| Changes When Uppercased | Yes |
| Script | Latin |
| Script Extensions | Latin |
| Indic Syllabic Category | Other |
| ID Start | Yes |
| XID Start | Yes |
| ID Continue | Yes |
| XID Continue | Yes |
| Alphabetic | Yes |
| Vertical Orientation | Rotated |
| Grapheme Base | Yes |
| Grapheme Cluster Break | Other |
| Word Break | Alphabetic letter |
| Sentence Break | Lower |