U+16AF4 "ð–«´" Bassa Vah Combining High-Low Tone Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ð–«´
U+16AF4 "ð–«´" Bassa Vah Combining High-Low Tone is a diacritical mark used in the Bassa Vah script, which was historically employed to write the Bassa language of Liberia and Sierra Leone. This combining character is placed above a base consonant or vowel to indicate a specific tonal contour, namely a high-low falling tone, which is essential for distinguishing word meanings in this tonal language. The mark appears as a small, angled stroke that visually modifies the base character's pronunciation. It is part of the Bassa Vah block in Unicode, an early 20th century script revived in modern digital encoding to preserve and support this linguistic heritage.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+16AF4 |
| Version Added | 7.0 |
| Name | Bassa Vah Combining High-Low Tone |
| Block | Bassa Vah |
| General Category | Nonspacing Mark |
| Canonical Combining Class | Overlay |
| Bidirectional Class | Nonspacing Mark |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | 𖫴 |
| HTML Hex Encoding | 𖫴 |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xF0 0x96 0xAB 0xB4 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0xD81A 0xDEF4 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00016AF4 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \ud81a\udef4 |