U+028E "ʎ" Latin Small Letter Turned Y Unicode Character

Unicode Version 17.0

ʎ

U+028E "ʎ" Latin Small Letter Turned Y is a typographic symbol that represents a voiced palatal lateral approximant, a sound produced by placing the tongue against the hard palate and allowing air to flow around its sides, similar to the "lli" in the Italian word "aglio" or the "lh" in Portuguese "filho". This character is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to transcribe this specific consonant sound in languages such as Italian, Portuguese, and Catalan. It is also found in some orthographies for minority languages, and its shape is derived from the lowercase letter "y" rotated 180 degrees, distinguishing it from the similar looking "λ" (Greek lambda). The character was added to the Unicode standard in version 1.1, released in 1993, as part of the IPA Extensions block, providing a consistent digital representation for linguistic notation and phonetic transcription.

General Properties

Code Point U+028E
Version Added 1.1
Name Latin Small Letter Turned Y
Block IPA Extensions
General Category Lowercase Letter
Canonical Combining Class Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class Left To Right

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding ʎ
HTML Hex Encoding ʎ
UTF-8 Encoding 0xCA 0x8E
UTF-16 Encoding 0x028E
UTF-32 Encoding 0x0000028E
C/C++/Java Escape \u028e

Unicode Properties

NFC Quick Check Yes
NFD Quick Check Yes
NFKC Quick Check Yes
NFKD Quick Check Yes
Numeric Type None
Numeric Value NaN
Line Break Alphabetic
Lowercase Yes
Cased 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