Wa (kana)

Wa (hiragana: わ, katakana: ワ) is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one mora. It represents [wa] and has origins in the character 和. There is also a small ゎ/ヮ, that is used to write the morae /kwa/ and /gwa/ (くゎ, ぐゎ), which are almost obsolete in contemporary standard Japanese but still exist in the Ryukyuan languages. A few loanwords such as shiikwaasa (シークヮーサー; from Okinawan language) and Musica Antiqua Köln (ムジカ・アンティクヮ・ケルン, Mujika Antiikuwa Kerun; a German early music group) contain this letter in Japanese. Katakana ワ is also sometimes written with dakuten, ヷ, to represent a /va/ sound in foreign words; however, most IMEs lack a convenient way to write this. It is far more common to represent the /va/ sound with the digraph ヴァ.

Transliterationwa

Hiragana origin和

Katakana origin和

Man'yōgana和 丸 輪

Quick facts Transliteration, Hiragana origin ...

wa
Hiragana Katakana
Transliteration	wa
Hiragana origin	和
Katakana origin	和
Man'yōgana	和 丸 輪
Spelling kana	わらびのワ Warabi no "wa"
Unicode	U+308F, U+30EF
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The kana は (ha) is read as "wa" when it represents a particle.

The katakana va (ヷ), which is a wa with a dakuten ("voiced mark"), along with vu (ヴ), was first used by the educator Fukuzawa Yukichi for transcribing English in 1860^[1][2] in his English-Japanese dictionary, which featured such entries as Heaven(ヒーヴヌ) (Hīvunu), Venus(ヴェヌス) (Venusu), River(リーヷル) (Rīvaru), etc.^[3] It is intended to represent a voiced labiodental fricative [v] in foreign languages, but the actual pronunciation by Japanese speakers may be closer to a voiced bilabial fricative [β] (see Japanese phonology § Voiced bilabial fricative).