Palatal hook


The palatal hook is a type of hook diacritic formerly used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent palatalized consonants. 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.
The IPA recommended that esh and ezh not use the palatal hook, but instead get special curled symbols: ' and '. However, versions with the hook may have been used by some authors.
The palatal hook was withdrawn by the IPA in 1989, in favour of a superscript j following the consonant.
Palatal hooks are also used in Lithuanian dialectology by the Lithuanian Phonetic Transcription System. and in the orthography of Nez Perce.

Computer encoding

includes both a combining character for the palatal hook, as well as several precomposed characters, including superscript letters with palatal hooks.
While LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH PALATAL HOOK has been in Unicode since 1991, the rest were not added until 2005 or later. As such, font support for the latter characters is much less than for the former.
AppearanceCode pointName
̡U+0321COMBINING PALATALIZED HOOK BELOW
U+1D80LATIN SMALL LETTER B WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+A7C4LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+A794LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+1D81LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+1D82LATIN SMALL LETTER F WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+1D83LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+A795LATIN SMALL LETTER H WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+1D84LATIN SMALL LETTER K WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+1D85LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+1DAAMODIFIER LETTER L WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+1D86LATIN SMALL LETTER M WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+1D87LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+1D88LATIN SMALL LETTER P WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+1D89LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+1D8ALATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+1D8BLATIN SMALL LETTER ESH WITH PALATAL HOOK
ƫU+01ABLATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+1DB5MODIFIER LETTER T WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+1D8CLATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+1D8DLATIN SMALL LETTER X WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+A7C6LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z WITH PALATAL HOOK
U+1D8ELATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH PALATAL HOOK