Kra (letter)

ĸ in a Greenlandic–Danish dictionary from 1926

“Avangnâmioĸ” in all-caps, title of Greenlandic periodical from 1957, with the uppercase of ĸ as Kʼ.

Kra (Kʼ / ĸ) is a glyph formerly used to write the Kalaallisut language of Greenland and is now only found in Nunatsiavummiutut, 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 U+0138 ĸ LATIN SMALL LETTER KRA (HTML ĸ). If this is unavailable, q is substituted. The letter can be capitalized as Kʼ, but it is not encoded separately as a single letter because it is very similar to the Latin capital letter K followed by an apostrophe,^[1][2] preferably the modifier letter apostrophe, U+02BC ʼ modifier letter apostrophe (HTML ʼ).^[3]

In 1973, a spelling reform replaced kra in Greenlandic with the Latin small letter q (and its capital form, with the Latin capital letter Q).^[4]

Kra, small caps K (if present), and Cyrillic small к, using the fonts: Arial, Times New Roman, Doulos SIL, Cambria, Linux Libertine, Andron Mega Corpus, Adobe Minion Pro, Courier New, and Consolas. Second row: italics, using the same fonts.

Notes

1. ↑ Everson, Michael (1998-09-12). "Responses to NCITS/L2 and Unicode Consortium comments on numerous proposals" (PDF). 
2. ↑ Everson, Michael (1998-05-25). "Additional Latin characters for the UCS" (PDF). 
3. ↑ Aliprand, Joan M. (2002-04-21). "Status of Mapping between Characters of ISO 5426-2 and ISO/IEC 10646-1 (UCS)" (PDF). The capital form of the letter kra can be encoded as the sequence U+004B LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K followed by U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE. 
4. ↑ Everson, Michael. "Greenlandic alphabet" (PDF). Evertype. Retrieved 2009-06-23.  Note that in the Greenlandic alphabet PDF from Evertype, the apostrophe-like symbol is represented by the symbol of U+2018, LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK. However Michael Everson uses the shape of the right single quotation mark or modifier letter apostrophe in other documents (e.g. Everson 1998).