Z with swash tail

Latin letter formerly used in African linguistics and Shona
Latin Z with swash tail

Ɀ (lowercase: ɀ) is a Latin letter z with a "swash tail" (encoded by Unicode, at codepoints U+2C7F for uppercase and U+0240 for lowercase) was used as a phonetic symbol by linguists studying African languages to represent a voiced labio-alveolar fricative ([zʷ]).[1][2]

In 1931, it was adopted into the orthography of Shona for a 'whistled' z, but it was dropped in 1955 due to the lack of the character on typewriters and fonts. Today the digraph zv is used.

It is sometimes used to transcribe Toda's /d̪z̪/.

Notes and references

  1. ^ Proposal to add two Africanist phonetic characters to the UCS, Michael Everson & Peter Constable, June 12, 2004.
  2. ^ Proposal to encode two phonetic characters and two Shona characters, Lorna A. Priest, October 2, 2007.

See also

  • ȿ
  • ƍ
  • Ȥ "Z with hook"
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