U+1E49 "ṉ" Latin Small Letter N with Line Below Unicode Character

U+1E49 "ṉ" Latin Small Letter N with Line Below is a specialized letter used primarily in the transliteration of certain Indic languages, such as Tamil and Malayalam, where it represents a retroflex nasal sound distinct from the standard dental or alveolar "n". The line below the letter signals that the tongue is curled back to produce this retroflex articulation, which is crucial for accurately representing phonetic distinctions in those writing systems. This character belongs to the Latin Extended Additional block and is encoded for digital text to support scholarly and linguistic work where precise orthographic representation is needed without relying on complex diacritic combinations or custom fonts.