U+0D3E "ാ" Malayalam Vowel Sign Aa Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ാ
U+0D3E "ാ" Malayalam Vowel Sign Aa is a combining diacritical mark used in the Malayalam script to indicate the long vowel sound "aa" (ā). It appears as a distinct right-curving sign attached to the right side of a consonant character, modifying its inherent vowel from a short 'a' to a long 'ā'. This character is essential for accurately representing the phonetic length of vowels in Malayalam words, playing a key role in distinguishing meaning between words that differ only by vowel length. As a modifier, it is always used in conjunction with a base consonant and never appears independently, following the standard orthographic rules of the Malayalam abugida.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+0D3E |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Malayalam Vowel Sign Aa |
| Block | Malayalam |
| General Category | Spacing Mark |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ാ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ാ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE0 0xB4 0xBE |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x0D3E |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00000D3E |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u0d3e |