| Heng | |
| Letter: | Ꜧ ꜧ |
| Imagealt: | Capital and lowercase letter Heng |
| Script: | Latin script |
| Type: | Alphabet |
| Typedesc: | ic |
| Language: | Unified Northern Alphabet |
Heng is a letter of the Latin alphabet, originating as a typographic ligature of h and ŋ. It is used for a voiceless y-like sound, such as in Dania transcription of the Danish language.
Heng was used word-finally in early transcriptions of Mayan languages, where it may have represented a uvular fricative.
It is sometimes used to write Judeo-Tat.
Heng has been occasionally used by phonologists to represent a jocular phoneme in English, which includes both pronounced as /[h]/ and pronounced as /[ŋ]/ as its allophones, to illustrate the limited usefulness of minimal pairs to distinguish phonemes. pronounced as //h// and pronounced as //ŋ// are separate phonemes in English, even though no minimal pair for them exists due to their complementary distribution.[1]
Heng is also used in Bantu linguistics to indicate a voiced alveolar lateral fricative (pronounced as /[ɮ]/).[2]
Both and are encoded in Unicode block Latin Extended-D; they were added with Unicode version 5.1 in April 2008.
A variant form,, is encoded as part of the IPA Extensions Block. It is used to represent the voiceless palatal-velar fricative in the International Phonetic Alphabet. is used as a superscript IPA letter[3]
The Teuthonista phonetic transcription system uses both heng and .[4]
. Geoffrey K. Pullum . Ladusaw, William A. . 1996 . . University of Chicago Press . 77.