Wa (kana)


Wa is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one mora. It represents and has origins in the character 和. There is also a small ゎ/ヮ, that is used to write the morae /kwa/ and /gwa/, which are almost obsolete in contemporary standard Japanese but still exist in the Ryukyuan languages. A few loanwords such as and Musica Antiqua Köln contain this letter in Japanese. Katakana ワ is also sometimes written with dakuten, ヷ, to represent a sound in foreign words; however, most IMEs lack a convenient way to write this. It is far more common to represent the /va/ sound with the digraph ヴァ.
FormRōmajiHiraganaKatakana
Normal w-
waわワ
Normal w-
waa
wā		わあ
わー		ワア
ワー

The kana は (ha) is read as "wa" when it represents a particle.
The katakana, which is a wa with a dakuten, along with, was first used by the educator Fukuzawa Yukichi for transcribing English in 1860 in his English-Japanese dictionary, which featured such entries as,,, etc. It is intended to represent a voiced labiodental fricative in foreign languages, but the actual pronunciation by Japanese speakers may be closer to a voiced bilabial fricative .

Other communicative representations