U+02AF "ʯ" Latin Small Letter Turned H with Fishhook and Tail Unicode Character

Unicode Version 17.0

ʯ

U+02AF "ʯ" Latin Small Letter Turned H with Fishhook and Tail is a phonetic symbol used primarily in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet to represent a specific voiceless sound, typically a voiceless palatal or pre-velar fricative. Its shape is derived from the letter h, rotated 180 degrees and modified with a fishhook-style curl at the top and a short tail at the bottom, distinguishing it from similar characters in the same phonetic set. This character was added to Unicode as part of the Latin Extended-B block to support precise transcription in linguistic studies of Uralic languages, such as certain dialects of Sami or Finno-Ugric languages. Its appearance may vary across fonts but maintains the distinct hook and tail features to ensure accurate phonetic representation.

General Properties

Code Point U+02AF
Version Added 4.0
Name Latin Small Letter Turned H with Fishhook and Tail
Block IPA Extensions
General Category Lowercase Letter
Canonical Combining Class Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class Left To Right

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding ʯ
HTML Hex Encoding ʯ
UTF-8 Encoding 0xCA 0xAF
UTF-16 Encoding 0x02AF
UTF-32 Encoding 0x000002AF
C/C++/Java Escape \u02af

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