U+0DCA "්" Sinhala Sign Al-Lakuna Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
්
U+0DCA "්" Sinhala Sign Al-Lakuna is a combining mark in the Sinhala script used to suppress the inherent vowel of a consonant, functioning as a virama or halant that indicates the consonant is pronounced without any following vowel sound. This diacritic is placed directly beneath a Sinhala consonant character to create a pure consonant, often appearing in composite conjuncts or in loanwords from languages like Pali and Sanskrit. As a critical element of Sinhala orthography, Al-Lakuna enables the accurate representation of consonant clusters and the phonetic adaptation of foreign terms within written Sinhala.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+0DCA |
| Version Added | 3.0 |
| Name | Sinhala Sign Al-Lakuna |
| Block | Sinhala |
| General Category | Nonspacing Mark |
| Canonical Combining Class | Virama |
| Bidirectional Class | Nonspacing Mark |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ් |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ් |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE0 0xB7 0x8A |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x0DCA |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00000DCA |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u0dca |