Reversed glottal stop
The reversed glottal stop,, is a letter of the Latin script. It is used to denote a voiced [pharyngeal fricative] and similar sounds, either as a caseless letter as in the International Phonetic Alphabet, or as a cased pair in the Pilagá alphabet. Like the glottal stop, which is derived historically from an apostrophe, it derives from the turned comma, as does the half ring.
Graphic variants
In Unicode, five graphic variants of the reversed glottal stop are available.- Caseless, used in phonetic transcriptions and some orthographies.
- Casing pair and, used in Pilagá orthography.
- Superscript, graphical alternative of.
- Superscript, technical superscript of caseless.
- Caseless
- Superscript
Usage
The phonetic symbol ʕ became part of the International Phonetic Alphabet History of [the International Phonetic Alphabet#1928 revisions|in 1928], replacing the small capital Q used in the 1912 Principles, to transcribe the voiced pharyngeal fricative. Like the glottal stop letter, it has since been borrowed into Americanist phonetic notation and the transliteration of languages such as Arabic.The reversed glottal stop is used as a caseless letter in several orthographies: Okanagan and Columbia-Moses in the United States, Ditinaht, Nuuchahnulth, St'at'imcets and Thompson in Canada. In Ethiopia, it is used by some authors in Tsamai while others use, and was used in Ale but has been replaced by.
The bicameral form of the letter is used in the Pilagá language to represent the voiced pharyngeal fricative. It was created in 1996 after much deliberation throughout the Pilagá community, along with the rest of the Pilagá alphabet. In Pilagá, it is rendered similarly to the gelded reversed question mark.
Appearance in computer fonts
The caseless has been in Unicode since version 1.1 and has been available in previous phonetic encodings as well.The casing pair and were added to Unicode in Latin Extended-D on September 9th, 2025, with the release of Unicode 17.0.0. Due to its infrequent usage and recent introduction into Unicode, few fonts have created a glyph for it, and the character may appear rendered as a box to many users. and occupy codepoints and respectively.