Modifier Tone Letters

Modifier Tone Letters is a Unicode block containing tone markings for Chinese, Chinantec, Africanist, and other phonetic transcriptions. It does not contain the standard IPA tone marks, which are found in Spacing Modifier Letters.

Modifier Tone Letters
Range	U+A700..U+A71F (32 code points)
Plane	BMP
Scripts	Common
Symbol sets	Tone marks
Assigned	32 code points
Unused	0 reserved code points
Unicode version history
4.1 (2005)	23 (+23)
5.0 (2006)	27 (+4)
5.1 (2008)	32 (+5)
Unicode documentation
Code chart ∣ Web page
Note: [1][2]

⟨꜀◌ ꜁◌ ꜂◌ ꜃◌ ◌꜄ ◌꜅ ◌꜆ ◌꜇⟩ are used to mark yin and (underlined) yang splits of the ping, shang, qu and ru tones, respectively, in the etymological four-tone analysis of Chinese. The dotted tone letters ⟨꜈ ꜉ ꜊ ꜋ ꜌⟩ are used for the pitch of neutral tones, while the reversed tone letters ⟨꜒ ꜓ ꜔ ꜕ ꜖⟩ and neutral ⟨꜍ ꜎ ꜏ ꜐ ꜑⟩ are used for tone sandhi. ⟨ ꜗ  ꜘ  ꜙ  ꜚ ⟩ are modifier letters used in Ozumacín Chinantec. ⟨ꜛ ꜜ⟩ are the IPA modifier letters for upstep and downstep, while ⟨ꜝ ꜞ ꜟ⟩ are substitutes people used before broad font support of the IPA, and still preferred by some.

Block

Modifier Tone Letters[1] Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF)

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

F

U+A70x

꜀

꜁

꜂

꜃

꜄

꜅

꜆

꜇

꜈

꜉

꜊

꜋

꜌

꜍

꜎

꜏

U+A71x

꜐

꜑

꜒

꜓

꜔

꜕

꜖

ꜗ

ꜘ

ꜙ

ꜚ

ꜛ

ꜜ

ꜝ

ꜞ

ꜟ

Notes 1.^ As of Unicode version 16.0

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Modifier Tone Letters block:

Version	Final code points[lower-alpha 1]	Count	L2 ID	WG2 ID	Document
4.1	U+A700..A716	23	L2/03-317	N2626	Proposal on IPA Extensions & Combining Diacritical Marks for ISO/IEC 10646 in BMP, 2003-09-27
			L2/03-339	N2646	Constable, Peter (2003-10-08), Comments on N2626, Proposal on IPA Extensions and Combining Diacritic Marks for ISO/IEC 10646 in BMP
			L2/03-372	N2673	Anderson, Deborah (2003-10-22), Comments on N2626, "Proposal on IPA Extensions & Combining Diacritic Marks for ISO 10646 in BMP"
			L2/04-107	N2713	Revised Proposal for encoding A Supplemented Set of IPA Combining Marks, Modifier Letters & Five-Degree Contour Tone Marks, 2004-03-20
			L2/04-156R2		Moore, Lisa (2004-08-13), "Supplemental set of IPA combing marks, modifier letters, and five-degree contour tone marks (A.7)", UTC #99 Minutes
5.0	U+A717..A71A	4	L2/04-246R		Priest, Lorna (2004-07-26), Revised Proposal for Additional Latin Phonetic and Orthographic Characters
			L2/04-349		Priest, Lorna (2004-08-27), Proposal to Encode Chinantec Tone Marks and Orthographic 'at' Characters
			L2/04-349R	N2883	Priest, Lorna (2004-12-09), Proposal to Encode Chinantec Tone Marks
5.1	U+A71B..A71F	5		N2945	Priest, Lorna; Constable, Peter (2005-08-09), Proposal to Encode Additional Latin Phonetic and Orthographic Characters
				N2953 (pdf, doc)	Umamaheswaran, V. S. (2006-02-16), "7.2.8", Unconfirmed minutes of WG 2 meeting 47, Sophia Antipolis, France; 2005-09-12/15
				N3103 (pdf, doc)	Umamaheswaran, V. S. (2006-08-25), "M48.1", Unconfirmed minutes of WG 2 meeting 48, Mountain View, CA, USA; 2006-04-24/27
Proposed code points and characters names may differ from final code points and names

See also

• Phonetic symbols in Unicode

References

1. "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
2. "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.