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, 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– even on those used for palatal consonants, – but it is not attested on all of the IPA letters of its era.^[2] It was withdrawn by the IPA in 1989, in favour of a superscript j following the consonant (i.e., ⟨ƫ⟩ becomes ⟨tʲ⟩).^[1]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⟩. However, versions with the hook have been used and are supported by Unicode.

Palatal hooks are also used for Lithuanian dialectology in the Lithuanian Phonetic Transcription System (or Lithuanian Phonetic Alphabet), including the exceptional form ꞔ, which is not a c plus palatal hook but rather a graphic variant of ᶃ once recommended by the IPA.^[3]

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 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 17.^[4] 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				w
						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]