Ń

Ń (minuscule: ń) is a letter formed by putting an acute accent over the letter N. In the Belarusian Łacinka alphabet; the alphabets of Polish, Kashubian, Wymysorys and the Sorbian languages; and the romanization of Khmer, it represents /ɲ/,^[1]which is the same as Czech and Slovak ň, Serbo-Croatian and Albanian nj, Spanish and Galician ñ, Italian and French gn, Hungarian and Catalan ny, and Portuguese nh. In Yoruba, it represents a syllabic /n/ with a high tone, and it often connects a pronoun to a verb: for example, when using the pronoun for "I" with the verb for "to eat", the resulting expression is mo ń jeun.

Usage[edit]

Polish[edit]

In Polish, it appears directly after ⟨n⟩ in the alphabet, but no Polish word begins with this letter, because it may not appear before a vowel (the letter may appear only before a consonant or in the word-final position).^[2] In the former case, a digraph ⟨ni⟩ is used to indicate /ɲ/. If the vowel following is /i/, only one ⟨i⟩ appears.

Examples[edit]

kwiecień (help·info) (April)
hańba (disgrace)
niebo (sky, heaven)
jedzenie (food)
dłoń (hand)
słońce (sun)

Cantonese[edit]

It is used in the Yale romanisation of Cantonese when the nasal syllable /ŋ̩/ has a rising tone.

Lule Sami[edit]

Traditionally ⟨Ń⟩ has been used in Lule Sami to represent /ŋ/. However in modern orthography, such as signage in Lule Sami by the Swedish government, ⟨Ŋ⟩ is used instead.

Kazakh[edit]

In Kazakh, it was proposed in 2018 to replace the Cyrillic Ң by this Latin alphabet and represents /ŋ/. The replacement suggestion was modified to Ŋ in 2019; and in 2021, it was suggested to replace it with Ñ.

Computer use[edit]

HTML characters and Unicode code point numbers:

Ń: Ń or Ń – U+0143
ń: ń or ń – U+0144

In Unicode, Ń and ń are located the "Latin Extended-A" block.

References[edit]

^ Childs, G. Tucker (2014). "Chapter 2 Phonemic inventory". De Gruyter. Retrieved 2022-10-13.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
^ G.E., Booij; J., Rubach; Letteren, Faculteit der (1990-01-01). "Syllable structure assignment in Polish". openaccess.leidenuniv.nl. Retrieved 2016-04-12.

[1] Childs, G. Tucker (2014). "Chapter 2 Phonemic inventory". De Gruyter. Retrieved 2022-10-13.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

[2] G.E., Booij; J., Rubach; Letteren, Faculteit der (1990-01-01). "Syllable structure assignment in Polish". openaccess.leidenuniv.nl. Retrieved 2016-04-12.

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