U+30EE "ヮ" Katakana Letter Small Wa Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ヮ
U+30EE "ヮ" Katakana Letter Small Wa is a diacritical mark in the Japanese katakana script, distinct from the full-sized "ワ" (Wa) in that it is written at a smaller scale and primarily functions not as an independent syllable but as a modifier to form compound sounds when attached to other characters, specifically to create the "kwa" and "gwa" sounds in modern loanword transcription and in the representation of non-standard Japanese phonetic elements. Unlike most small kana, it does not represent a length mark or palatalization, but rather narrow vowel coalescence, making it a specialized tool in the orthography of foreign word adaptation rather than a core component of everyday Japanese writing.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+30EE |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Katakana Letter Small Wa |
| Block | Katakana |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ヮ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ヮ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE3 0x83 0xAE |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x30EE |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x000030EE |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u30ee |