Ɀ (lowercase: ɀ) is a Latin letter z with a "swash tail" (encoded by Unicode, at codepoints U+2C7F for uppercase and U+0240 for lowercase). It was used as a phonetic symbol by linguists studying African languages to represent a voiced labio-alveolar fricative ().Proposal to add two Africanist phonetic characters to the UCS, Michael Everson & Peter Constable, June 12, 2004. Proposal to encode two phonetic characters and two Shona characters, Lorna A. Priest, October 2, 2007.
In 1931, it was adopted into the orthography of Shona for a 'whistled' or labialized z, but it was dropped in 1955 due to the lack of the character on typewriters and fonts. Use of this character for Shona was significant enough to be mentioned as an additional character in the 1949 guide to the International Phonetic Alphabet, although the character was never an official part of the IPA. However, even at that time, the digraph zv was also used instead of ɀ in Shona writing systems, and zv is the standard way of writing this sound at present.
It is sometimes used to transcribe Toda's /d̪z̪/.
Notes and references
See also ȿ ƍ Ȥ "Z with hook"