ʼn


ʼn or N-apostrophe is a Unicode code point for in the Afrikaans language of South Africa. The code point is currently deprecated, and the Unicode standard recommends that a sequence of an apostrophe followed by n be used instead, as the use of deprecated characters such as ʼn is “strongly discouraged”. In fact, it was removed from the Charis SIL and Doulos SIL fonts. It is however in quite general use in the Afrikaans versions of Facebook and other publications, probably to avoid the tendency of auto-correction to turn a typed ′n into ‘n which is incorrect but common.

Grammar

The letter is the indefinite article of Afrikaans, and is pronounced as a schwa. The symbol itself came about as a contraction of its Dutch equivalent wikt:een meaning "one".
When ʼn comes before a vowel, it may be pronounced the same as English an. This pronunciation is not common at all and may be limited to older speakers – in general, the pronunciation mentioned above is used in all cases.
In Afrikaans, ʼn is never capitalised in standard texts. Instead, the first letter of the following word is capitalised.
An exception to this rule is in newspaper headlines, or sentences and phrases where all the letters are capitalised.

Miscellaneous

The upper case, or majuscule form has never been included in any international keyboards Therefore, it is decomposable by simply combining ʼ and N. 〔ʼN〕
It is also a legacy compatibility character for the ISO/IEC 6937 text encoding.