U+30A1 "ァ" Katakana Letter Small A Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ァ
U+30A1 "ァ" Katakana Letter Small A is a typographic variant of the standard katakana character "ア" (A), specifically designed to be smaller in size. This reduced form is primarily used in Japanese writing to indicate a shortened or devoiced vowel sound, often occurring in loanwords and onomatopoeia where it modifies the preceding consonant or creates a distinct phonetic nuance, such as in the word "ファ" (fa) where the small "ァ" signals the sound [a] after the "f" consonant.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+30A1 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Katakana Letter Small A |
| Block | Katakana |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ァ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ァ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE3 0x82 0xA1 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x30A1 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x000030A1 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u30a1 |