Palatal hook

The palatal hook (◌̡) is a type of hook diacritic formerly used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent palatalized and prevelar consonants.^[1] It is a small, leftwards-facing hook joined to the bottom-right side of a letter, and is distinguished from various other hooks indicating retroflexion, etc. Theoretically, it could be used on all IPA consonant letters, – even on those used for palatal consonants, – but it is not attested on all of the IPA letters of its era.^[2] It was withdrawn by the IPA in 1989, in favour of a superscript j following the consonant (i.e., ⟨ƫ⟩ becomes ⟨tʲ⟩).^[1]

N with palatal hook, followed by eng, a palatal nasal and a retroflex nasal for comparison.

The IPA recommended that esh ⟨ ʃ ⟩ and ezh ⟨ʒ⟩ not use the palatal hook, but instead get special curled symbols: ⟨ ʆ ⟩ and ⟨ʓ⟩. However, versions with the hook have been used and are supported by Unicode.

Palatal hooks are also used for Lithuanian dialectology in the Lithuanian Phonetic Transcription System (or Lithuanian Phonetic Alphabet), including the exceptional form ꞔ, which is not a c plus palatal hook but rather a graphic variant of ᶃ once recommended by the IPA.^[3]

Scope

The palatal hook was introduced in 1921 and officially adopted in 1928. The last published IPA chart to support it was that of 1979. The following consonants appear on that chart. Those attested with palatal hook are bolded and set with the hook; the hooked letters are either in Unicode or are scheduled to appear in Unicode 17.^[4] The columns for palatal letters are omitted; they are generally redundant with the hook, though 'palatalized palatals' are described in the literature. C with hook, ꞔ, is not a palatal letter but a script variant of ᶃ.^[2]

ᶆ		ɱ				ᶇ		ɳ				𝼔		ɴ
ᶈ	ᶀ					ƫ	ᶁ	ʈ	ɖ			ᶄ	ᶃ/ꞔ	q̡	ɢ̡					ʔ
ɸ̡	β̡	ᶂ	ᶌ	θ̡	ð̡	ᶊ	ᶎ	ʂ	ʐ	ᶋ	𝼘	ᶍ	ɣ̡	χ̡	ʁ̡	ʍ		ħ̡	ʕ̡	ꞕ	ɦ
		ʋ̡				𝼕		ɻ				ɰ				w
						𝼓	ɮ
						ᶅ		ɭ
						ᶉ								ʀ̡
						𝼖		ɽ̡
	ɓ						ɗ̡						ɠ
ʘ				ʇ		ʗ
						ʖ

Other non-palatal consonants listed below the chart:

ᵵ, ɫ̡ (etc.): should be typeset with the hook letter and an overstruck tilde diacritic or vice versa

ɼ [used for Czech, does not occur palatalized]

ɺ

ɧ [used for Swedish, does not occur palatalized]

ʦ̡ 𝼗 𝼒 [ʣ̡ is implied but not listed on the chart]

Computer encoding

Unicode includes a combining character for the palatal hook, but it is not canonically equivalent to the precomposed characters, which should be used instead.^[2]

Appearance	Code point	Name
◌̡	U+0321	COMBINING PALATALIZED HOOK BELOW
ᶀ	U+1D80	LATIN SMALL LETTER B WITH PALATAL HOOK
Ꞔ	U+A7C4	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH PALATAL HOOK
ꞔ	U+A794	LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶁ	U+1D81	LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH PALATAL HOOK
𝼒	U+1DF12	LATIN SMALL LETTER DEZH DIGRAPH WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶂ	U+1D82	LATIN SMALL LETTER F WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶃ	U+1D83	LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH PALATAL HOOK
ꞕ	U+A795	LATIN SMALL LETTER H WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶄ	U+1D84	LATIN SMALL LETTER K WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶅ	U+1D85	LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶪ	U+1DAA	MODIFIER LETTER L WITH PALATAL HOOK
𝼓	U+1DF13	LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH BELT AND PALATAL HOOK
ᶆ	U+1D86	LATIN SMALL LETTER M WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶇ	U+1D87	LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH PALATAL HOOK
𝼔	U+1DF14	LATIN SMALL LETTER ENG WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶈ	U+1D88	LATIN SMALL LETTER P WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶉ	U+1D89	LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH PALATAL HOOK
𝼕	U+1DF15	LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED R WITH PALATAL HOOK
𝼖	U+1DF16	LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH FISHHOOK AND PALATAL HOOK
ᶊ	U+1D8A	LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶋ	U+1D8B	LATIN SMALL LETTER ESH WITH PALATAL HOOK
ƫ	U+01AB	LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶵ	U+1DB5	MODIFIER LETTER T WITH PALATAL HOOK
𝼗	U+1DF17	LATIN SMALL LETTER TESH DIGRAPH WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶌ	U+1D8C	LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶍ	U+1D8D	LATIN SMALL LETTER X WITH PALATAL HOOK
Ᶎ	U+A7C6	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶎ	U+1D8E	LATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH PALATAL HOOK
𝼘	U+1DF18	LATIN SMALL LETTER EZH WITH PALATAL HOOK

References

1. Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A guide to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. 1999.
2. L2/24-050: Unicode request for letters with palatal hook
3. Tumasonis, Vladas; Pentzlin, Karl (2011-05-24). "N4070: Second revised proposal to add characters used in Lithuanian dialectology to the UCS" (PDF). ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2.
4. Unicode Pipeline, 2024