U+130B "ጋ" Ethiopic Syllable Gaa Unicode Character

Unicode Version 17.0

U+130B "ጋ" Ethiopic Syllable Gaa is a glyph from the Geʽez script, representing the syllable "gaa" in the Ethiopian and Eritrean semitic languages such as Amharic and Tigrinya. This character is part of the Ethiopic block in Unicode, which encodes the syllabary used for writing these languages, where each symbol combines a consonant with a specific vowel. The shape of ጋ corresponds to the base consonant "g" (ቀ) modified by a diacritic or stroke to indicate the long "a" vowel sound, reflecting the script's abugida system where consonant forms are adapted for vowel distinctions. Historically, Geʽez is one of the oldest alphabets still in active use, and U+130B continues to be essential for modern digital communication, text rendering, and linguistic documentation across the Horn of Africa.

General Properties

Code Point U+130B
Version Added 3.0
Name Ethiopic Syllable Gaa
Block Ethiopic
General Category Other Letter
Canonical Combining Class Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class Left To Right

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding ጋ
HTML Hex Encoding ጋ
UTF-8 Encoding 0xE1 0x8C 0x8B
UTF-16 Encoding 0x130B
UTF-32 Encoding 0x0000130B
C/C++/Java Escape \u130b

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
Script Ethiopic
Script Extensions Ethiopic
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 OLetter