The okina visually resembles a left single quotation mark —a small "6"-shaped mark above the baseline. The Tahitian eta has a distinct shape, like an okina turned 90° or more clockwise.
Orthography and official status
The okina is a letter in the Hawaiian alphabet. It is unicameral—that is, it does not have separate uppercase and lowercase forms—unlike the other letters, all of which are basic Latin letters. For words that begin with an okina, capitalization rules affect the next letter instead: for instance, at the beginning of a sentence, the name of the letter is written "Okina", with a capital O.
In the ASCII character set, the okina is typically represented by the apostrophe character, ASCII value 39 in decimal and 27 in hexadecimal. This character is typically rendered as a straight typewriter apostrophe, lacking the curve of the okina proper. In some fonts, the ASCII apostrophe is rendered as a right single quotation mark, which is an even less satisfactory glyph for the okina—essentially a 180° rotation of the correct shape. Many other character sets expanded on the overloaded ASCII apostrophe, providing distinct characters for the left and right single quotation marks. The left single quotation mark has been used as an acceptable approximation to the okina, though it still has problems: the okina is a letter, not a punctuation mark, which may cause incorrect behaviour in automated text processing. Additionally, the left single quotation mark is represented in some typefaces by a mirrored "9" glyph, rather than a "6", which is unsuitable for the okina.
In the Unicode standard, the okina is encoded as, which can be rendered in HTML by the entityʻ. Although this letter was introduced in Unicode 1.1, lack of support for this character prevented easy and universal use for many years., OS X, Microsoft Windows and Linux-based computers and all new major smartphones have no problem with the glyph, and it is no longer a problem in Internet Explorer 7 as it was in previous versions. U+02BB should be the value used in encoding new data when the expected use of the data permits. The same character is sometimes used in Latin transliterations of the Hebrew letterʻáyin and the Arabic letterʻayn as well as in the Uzbek alphabet to write the letters Oʻ and Gʻ. However, "okina" and other Polynesian names are properly reserved for the glottal stop in Polynesian language orthographies. Other glottal stop characters, such as, are inappropriate for the okina. The distinct form of the Tahitian and Wallisian glottal stop is not currently assigned a separate character in Unicode.
