The modifier letter turned comma is a character found in Unicode that is used in a number of Polynesian alphabets as the letter ʻokina to represent the glottal stop, and in the Uzbek alphabet to form the letters Oʻ and Gʻ, which correspond to Ў and Ғ respectively in the Uzbek Cyrillic alphabet.
The letter turned comma is encoded at, which can be rendered in HTML by the entity ʻ
(or in hexadecimal form ʻ
), in the Spacing Modifier Letters Unicode block.
In Unicode code charts it looks identical to the,[1] but this is not true for all fonts. The primary difference between the letter turned comma and U+2018
is that the letter turned comma U+02BB
has the Unicode General Category "Letter, modifier" (Lm), while U+2018
has the category "Punctuation, Initial quote" (Pi).
The character is used in many Polynesian languages as ʻokina, a unicameral consonant letter used within the Latin script to mark the phonemic glottal stop.
In the Uzbek alphabet, the letter turned comma is used to write the letters Oʻ (Cyrillic Ў) and Gʻ (Cyrillic Ғ).
It is sometimes used in Latin transliterations of the Hebrew letter ʻáyin and the Arabic letter ʻayn.
The letter turned comma is also often used to romanize aspirated consonants in Armenian.