Kra (letter)

Kra (Κʻ / ĸ) is a character formerly used to write the Kalaallisut language of Greenland and is now only found in the Labrador Inuit Language of Inuttitut, a distinct Inuktitut dialect. It is visually similar to a Latin small capital letter K and the Greek letter kappa κ.

It is used to denote the sound written as [q] in the International Phonetic Alphabet (the voiceless uvular plosive). For collation purposes, it is therefore considered to be a type of q, rather than a type of k, and should sort near q.

Its Unicode code point for the lowercase form is decimal 312 and hexadecimal U+0138. If this is unavailable, q is substituted. The letter can be capitalized as Κʻ, but it is not encoded separately as a single letter because it is very similar to the Latin capital letter K followed by the six-shaped apostrophe (turned high comma ʻ).

In 1973, a spelling reform replaced the use of Kra with Latin small letter q (and the associated Latin capital letter Q).^[1]

Notes

1. ^ "Greenlandic alphabet" (PDF). Evertype. http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/greenlandic.pdf. Retrieved 2009-06-23.