Palatal hook

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

The palatal hook (◌̡) is a hook diacritic formerly used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to mark palatalized consonants.[1] It is a small, leftwards-facing hook joined to the bottom-right side of a letter that derives from a subscript letter j, and it is distinct from other IPA hooks that indicate retroflexion, implosion and rhotic vowels. 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– even on those used for palatal consonants – but it is not attested on all of the IPA letters of its era.[2] It was withdrawn by the IPA in 1989, in favor of a superscript j following the consonant (i.e., ⟨ƫ⟩ was replaced with ⟨tʲ⟩).[1]

The IPA recommended that esh ⟨ ʃ ⟩ and ezh ⟨ʒ⟩ not use the palatal hook, but instead get special curled symbols: ⟨ ʆ ⟩ and ⟨ʓ⟩. The same has been done with ⟨ɮ⟩.[3] However, versions with the hook have been used and are supported by Unicode, excluding unattested ⟨ɮ⟩.[3]

Palatal hooks are also used for Lithuanian dialectology in the Lithuanian Phonetic Transcription System (or Lithuanian Phonetic Alphabet), including the exceptional form ꞔ, which while graphically resembling a c plus palatal hook is actually a variant of the ᶃ once recommended by the IPA.[4]

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 single non-palatal 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 18 in 2026. 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] W with hook, 𝾂, is attested as a convenient transcription for a bilabial approximant.

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/ʆ*	𝼘/ʓ*	ᶍ	ɣ̡ (𝼱)	χ̡ (𝼽)	ʁ̡ (𝼶)	ʍ		ħ̡ (𝼲)	ʕ̡ (𝼺)	ꞕ	ɦ
		ʋ̡ (𝼹)				𝼕		ɻ				ɰ				w̡ (𝾂)
						𝼓	ɮ (𝽧)*
						ᶅ		ɭ
						ᶉ								ʀ̡ (𝼵)
						𝼖		ɽ̡ (𝼷)
	ɓ						ɗ̡ (𝼭)						ɠ
ʘ				ʇ		ʗ
						ʖ

*ʃ, ʒ and ɮ occur with a palatal curl, which was the preferred forms for these letters in the IPA of their era.

Other non-palatal consonants listed under the 1979 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] the sibilant affricates ʦ̡ (𝼸) 𝼗 𝼒. (The forms with a palatal curl, 𝼬 and 𝼫, will become available with Unicode 18.)

The affricate ʣ̡ (𝼮) is implied but is not listed under the 1979 chart.

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