Eng

The letter eng, with its two variant capital forms.

Eng or engma (majuscule: Ŋ, minuscule: ŋ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet, used to represent a velar nasal (as in English singing) in the written form of some languages and in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Appearance

Lowercase eng is derived from n with the addition of a hook to the right leg, somewhat like that of j. The uppercase has two variants: it can be based on the usual uppercase N, with a hook added (or "N-form"); or it can be an enlarged version of the lowercase (or "n-form"). The former is preferred in Sami languages that use it, the latter in African languages.

An 1856 text in Gamilaraay, using a rotated capital G as a substitute for ŋ.

Early printers, lacking a specific glyph for eng, sometimes approximated it by rotating a capital G, or by substituting a Greek eta (η) for it.

Usage

Technical transcription

• Americanist phonetic notation (where it may also represent a uvular nasal)
• Sometimes for the transcription of Australian Aboriginal languages
• International Phonetic Alphabet
• Uralic Phonetic Alphabet
• Rheinische Dokumenta, a phonetic alphabet for many West Central German, the Low Rhenish, and few related languages

Vernacular orthographies

Janalif variant of Eng is represented as N with descender.

Languages marked † no longer use eng, but formerly did.

• African languages
  • Bari
  • Dinka
  • Ewe
  • Fula
  • Luganda
  • Manding languages
  • Songhay languages
  • Wolof
• American languages
  • O'odham
• Australian Aboriginal languages
  • Bandjalang
• Languages of China
  • Zhuang† (replaced by the digraph ng in 1986)
• Sami languages
  • Inari Sami
  • Lule Sami
  • Northern Sami
  • Skolt Sami
• Turkic languages during Latinisation (USSR).
  • Tatar† (now ñ in Latin or ң in Cyrillic, see Jaŋalif and image above)

Computer encoding

Eng is present in ISO 8859-4 (Latin-4) in order to write the Sami languages, at BD (uppercase) and BF (lowercase). In Unicode, it is encoded as U+014A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ENG and U+014B LATIN SMALL LETTER ENG.

See also

• Ng (digraph)
• Nh (digraph)

Similar Latin letters:

• Ƞ ƞ
• Ɲ ɲ
• ɳ
• ɱ

Similar Cyrillic letters:

• Ӈ ӈ
• Ң ң
• Ҥ ҥ

External links

• Practical Orthography of African Languages