U+02AB "ʫ" Latin Small Letter Lz Digraph Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ʫ
U+02AB "ʫ" Latin Small Letter Lz Digraph is a typographic ligature representing a single sound unit, primarily used in phonetic transcription systems such as the International Phonetic Alphabet to denote the voiced alveolar lateral affricate, a consonant sound made by beginning with a plosive and releasing it into a lateral fricative. This character was encoded in Unicode to support precise linguistic notation, particularly for writing African languages like the Bassa language of Liberia, where it represents a distinct phonemic sound. Its visual form combines a lowercase "l" and "z" into a single connected glyph, reflecting its role as an individual speech sound rather than a sequence of two separate letters.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+02AB |
| Version Added | 3.0 |
| Name | Latin Small Letter Lz Digraph |
| Block | IPA Extensions |
| General Category | Lowercase Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ʫ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ʫ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xCA 0xAB |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x02AB |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x000002AB |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u02ab |