N (kana)
N is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one mora. ん is the only kana that does not end in a vowel sound. The kana for mu, む/ム, was originally used for the n sound as well, while ん was originally a hentaigana used for both n and mu. In the 1900 Japanese script reforms, hentaigana were officially declared obsolete and ん was officially declared a kana to represent the n sound.
In addition to being the only kana not ending with a vowel sound, it is also the only kana that does not begin any words in standard Japanese . Some regional dialects of Japanese feature words beginning with ん, as do the Ryukyuan languages, in which words starting with ン are common, such as the Okinawan word for miso, nnsu.
The kana is followed by an apostrophe in some systems of transliteration whenever it precedes a vowel or a y- kana, so as to prevent confusion with other kana. However, like every other kana besides yōon, it represents an entire mora, so its pronunciation is, in practice, as close to "nn" as "n". The pronunciation can also change depending on what sounds surround it. These are a few of the ways it can change:
| Form | Rōmaji | Hiragana | Katakana |
| Normal n | n | ん | ン |
| Normal n | nn n̄ | んん んー | ンン ンー |
| Rōmaji | Hiragana | Katakana | - |
| nwa | んわ | ンワ | Nwankwo Kanu |
| nwi | んうぃ | ンウィ | Nwisd |
| nwu | んうぅ | ンウゥ | |
| nwe | んうぇ | ンウェ | Nwenaing |
| nwo | んうぉ | ンウォ | Nwoya District |
Other communicative representations
| ん / ン in Japanese Braille: |
N is the only Katakana without a circled form in Unicode.
Names
The kana ん and ン and the various sounds they represent are known by the names and. One of the various meanings of the verb is to "make an upward brush-stroke" when writing, which is a gesture that is involved in writing the kana ん and ン. Another meaning is rather specific, to 'pronounce "n" as a syllabic consonant', in other words, to make the sounds represented by the kana ん and ン. It is not clear whether the calligraphic gesture involved in writing the kana or some phonetic gesture involved in producing the sounds gives the names hatsuon and haneru-on. English-language literature favors the descriptive name moraic nasal for the sounds.Historically, the name hatsuon was not used just for the Japanese moraic nasal, but also for ending nasals in Middle Chinese. The Meiji-era linguist Ōshima Masatake used the terms sokuon and hatsuon to describe ending consonants in Chinese. These sounds were classified as "Labial consonant, "Coronal consonant and "guttural". Hatsuon, in particular, were classified as follows: is the "labial nasal", is the "lingual nasal", and is the "guttural nasal". Another of Ōshima's descriptions even more explicitly related the terms sokuon and hatsuon to the four tones of Middle Chinese.
In earlier stages of Japanese, different realizations of the moraic nasal were actually indicated in writing. For example, during the Heian period, the "lingual nasal" was spelt differently when followed by a lingual consonant compared to the "labial nasal" when followed by a labial consonant. In both cases, the resulting nasal indicated . After the 11th century, the "lingual" and "labial" realizations were no longer distinguished in writing.