African D (Ɖ, ɖ) is a Latin letter representing the voiced retroflex plosive [ɖ]. It is a part of the African reference alphabet. It is mainly used by African languages such as Ewe,[1] Fon, Aja, and Bassa. The African D should not be confused with either the eth (Ð, ð) of Icelandic, Faroese and Old English or with the D with stroke (Đ, đ) of Vietnamese, Serbo-Croatian and Sami languages. However, the upper-case forms of these letters tend to look the same.

The lower-case variant (ɖ, known as retroflex D, D with tail, or D with retroflex hook) is used to represent the voiced retroflex plosive in the International Phonetic Alphabet (but in the transcription of the languages of India, the same sound may be represented by a d with dot below: ḍ).

Retroflex D on computers
Sample Unicode Name HTML reference
Latin Extended-B[2]
Ɖ U+0189 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AFRICAN D Ɖ
Ɖ
IPA Extensions[3]
ɖ U+0256 LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH TAIL (retroflex hook) ɖ
ɖ

See also

References

  1. ^ Omniglot: Ewe (Eʋegbe) (1998–). Retrieved 21 January 2012.
  2. ^ The Unicode Standard: Latin Extended-B (1991–2010). Retrieved 21 January 2012.
  3. ^ The Unicode Standard: IPA Extensions (1991–2010). Retrieved 21 January 2012.
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