A̍, or a̍, called "A with vertical line", is a letter used in the standard, unified spelling in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Pe̍h-ōe-jī romanization system for writing Hokkien (including Taiwanese). It consists of the letter A with a vertical line appearing as a diacritic above it.
Uses
Democratic Republic of the Congo The standard, unified spelling of Democratic Republic of the Congo uses the vertical line to indicate the middle tone in tonal languages needing to distinguish it. The 'a̍' represents an 'a' with a medium tone.
Taiwan In Pe̍h-ōe-jī and the Taiwanese romanization system used to write Hokkien, the 'a̍' represents an 'a' with tone 8, depending on the specific Hokkien dialect.
Digital encoding The A with vertical line can be represented in Unicode as a breakdown into the following pairs of characters, each consisting of a Latin letter followed by a diacritic.
FormRepresentationCode pointsDescriptionsupper caseA̍U+0041U+030DLatin Capital Letter ACombining Vertical Line Abovelower casea̍U+0061U+030DLatin Small Letter ACombining Vertical Line Above
See also Latin script A
Sources Draft of Proposal to add Latin characters required by Latinized Taiwanese Holo Language to ISO/IEC 10646