Palatal hook

The palatal hook (◌̡) is a type of hook diacritic formerly used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent palatalized and prevelar consonants.^[1] 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, implosion, etc. 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– even on those used for palatal consonants, – but it is not attested on all of the IPA letters of its era.^[2] It was withdrawn by the IPA in 1989, in favour of a superscript j following the consonant (i.e., ⟨ƫ⟩ becomes ⟨tʲ⟩).^[1]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, though a ⟨ɮ⟩ with palatal hook isn't attested.^[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 a c plus palatal hook is conceptually a variant of and semantically equivalent to 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. 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]

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	𝼘	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

Other non-palatal consonants listed below the 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]

ʦ̡ 𝼗 𝼒 [ʣ̡ is implied but not listed on the 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]