U+A78E "ꞎ" Latin Small Letter L with Retroflex Hook and Belt Unicode Character

Unicode Version 17.0

U+A78E "ꞎ" Latin Small Letter L with Retroflex Hook and Belt is a specialized phonetic symbol used primarily in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and some linguistic orthographies to represent a voiced retroflex lateral approximant, a sound produced with the tongue curled back toward the palate while air flows around the sides. Its design combines a lowercase "l" with a retroflex hook attached to the bottom right and a horizontal belt through the middle, distinguishing it from similar characters like the plain retroflex lateral. This character is relatively rare, appearing in scholarly texts on phonetics, language documentation, and minority language alphabets, and it helps linguists precisely transcribe sounds that occur in languages such as some indigenous languages of India and Africa.

General Properties

Code Point U+A78E
Version Added 6.0
Name Latin Small Letter L with Retroflex Hook and Belt
Block Latin Extended-D
General Category Lowercase Letter
Canonical Combining Class Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class Left To Right

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding ꞎ
HTML Hex Encoding ꞎ
UTF-8 Encoding 0xEA 0x9E 0x8E
UTF-16 Encoding 0xA78E
UTF-32 Encoding 0x0000A78E
C/C++/Java Escape \ua78e

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
Lowercase Yes
Cased Yes
Script Latin
Script Extensions Latin
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 Lower