Options for Representing Glottal Stops in Orthographies

People frequently ask what character to use to represent a glottal stop in orthographies. There are a lot of different things that people have done in the past.

If you want something that looks like a curly quote you should use U+02BC ʼ MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE. You could use U+2019 ’ RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK, but there are at least two issues with that. It is considered punctuation with different properties than an orthographic character and if you use quote marks there is nothing to distinguish between the two characters. (SIL’s Roman fonts (such as Andika, Charis, and Gentium) all have an alternate glyph for U+02BC ʼ MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE which is a bit larger than normal to help distinguish the glyph from U+2019 ’ RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK.)

Many orthographies have used something that looks like the straight quote. There were so many problems with using U+0027 ' APOSTROPHE for this character that SIL requested the addition of a character to Unicode for that. You should use U+A78C ꞌ LATIN SMALL LETTER SALTILLO (one language even “cases” this and U+A78B is used for the uppercase). (SIL’s Roman fonts (such as Andika, Charis, and Gentium) all have alternate glyphs for U+A78C ꞌ LATIN SMALL LETTER SALTILLO and U+A78B Ꞌ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SALTILLO which are a bit larger than normal to help distinguish the glyph from U+0027 ' APOSTROPHE.)

U+02BE ʾ MODIFIER LETTER RIGHT HALF RING is sometimes used for transliterating Arabic hamza (glottal stop). This looks different from both U+A78C ꞌ LATIN SMALL LETTER SALTILLO and U+02BC ʼ MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE and might be a good option for traditions which recognize the transliterated hamza.

Some Saskatchewan orthographies use an upper and lowercase glottal stop. Those are U+0241 Ɂ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER GLOTTAL STOP and U+0242 ɂ LATIN SMALL LETTER GLOTTAL STOP.

Of course, the IPA representation is U+0294 ʔ LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP and some languages also use this in their orthographies (where casing is not required).

There are some issues with using each of these. Most fonts will contain U+0027 ' APOSTROPHE and U+2019 ’ RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK. However, as mentioned above, they carry punctuation properties rather than letter properties. There are fewer fonts which have the other characters. As fonts are updated they are more and more likely to contain these other characters.

An alternative approach is to use a letter of the English alphabet that is not used in the standard orthography. For example, at least one language has chosen to use the letter <q> to represent glottal stop.

This article formerly appeared on ScriptSource.