The ʻokina (Hawaiian pronunciation: [ʔoˈkinɐ]) is the letter that transcribes the glottal stop consonant in Hawaiian. It does not have distinct uppercase and lowercase forms, and is represented electronically by the modifier letter turned comma: ʻ.
A phonemic glottal stop exists in many other Polynesian languages as well; these are usually written by a similar apostrophe-like letter.
Following are the names of the glottal stop consonant in various Polynesian languages, and notes on how they are represented in text.
In many fonts, the symbol for the ʻokina looks identical to the symbol for the curved single opening quotation mark. In others (like Linux Libertine) it's a slightly different size, either larger or smaller, as seen here:
In this phrase there is one ʻokina before the Ō and another one before the last i. These are slightly smaller than the quotation marks in the first line and slightly larger in the second.
The Tahitian ʻeta and Wallisian fakamoga have a distinct shape, like an ʻokina turned 90° or more clockwise.[citation needed]. It isn't separately assigned a character in Unicode, but it is supported in a few fonts such as Lucida Sans.
The ʻokina is treated as a separate letter in the Hawaiian alphabet. It is unicameral—that is, it does not have separate uppercase (capital or majuscule) and lowercase (small or minuscule) forms—unlike the other letters, all of which are basic Latin letters. For words that begin with an ʻokina, capitalization rules affect the next letter instead: for instance, at the beginning of a sentence, the name of the letter is written "ʻOkina", with a capital O.
The United States Board on Geographic Names lists relevant place names both with and without the ʻokina and kahakō (macron) in the Geographic Names Information System. Colloquially and formally, the forms have long been used interchangeably.[6]
In the ASCII character set, the ʻokina is typically represented by the apostrophe character ('), ASCII value 39 in decimal and 27 in hexadecimal. This character is typically rendered as a straight typewriter apostrophe, lacking the curve of the ʻokina proper. In some fonts, the ASCII apostrophe is rendered as a right single quotation mark, which is an even less satisfactory glyph for the ʻokina—essentially a 180° rotation of the correct shape.
Many other character sets expanded on the overloaded ASCII apostrophe, providing distinct characters for the left and right single quotation marks. The left single quotation mark has been used as an acceptable approximation to the ʻokina, though it still has problems: the ʻokina is a letter, not a punctuation mark, which may cause incorrect behaviour in automated text processing. Additionally, the left single quotation mark is represented in some typefaces by a mirrored "9" glyph, rather than a "6", which is unsuitable for the ʻokina.
In the Unicode standard, the ʻokina is encoded as U+02BB ʻ MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA (ʻ). It can be rendered in HTML by the entity ʻ
(or in hexadecimal form ʻ
).[3]
Although this letter was introduced in Unicode 1.1 (1993), lack of support for this character prevented easy and universal use for many years. As of 2008[update], OS X, Microsoft Windows and Linux-based computers and all new major smartphones have no problem with the glyph, and it is no longer a problem in Internet Explorer 7 as it was in previous versions. U+02BB should be the value used in encoding new data when the expected use of the data permits.
Other glottal stop characters, such as U+02C0 ˀ MODIFIER LETTER GLOTTAL STOP, are inappropriate for the ʻokina. The glottal stop letter in Tahitian and Wallisian has a distinct appearance, like the turned comma rotated 90° clockwise.[citation needed] This glyph is not currently assigned a separate character in Unicode. The currently implemented Unicode character that most closely resembles the ʻeta or fakamoga symbol is U+1D54 ᵔ MODIFIER LETTER SMALL TOP HALF O.