Heng (letter)

Heng is a letter of the Latin alphabet, originating as a typographic ligature of h and ŋ. It is used for a voiceless [j]-like sound, such as in Dania transcription of the Danish language (in Dania, it is considered a ligature of h and j).

Heng was used word-finally in early transcriptions of Mayan languages, where it may have represented a uvular fricative.

It is sometimes used to write Judeo-Tat.^{[citation needed]}

Heng has been occasionally used by phonologists to represent a jocular phoneme in English, which includes both [h] and [ŋ] as its allophones, to illustrate the limited usefulness of minimal pairs to distinguish phonemes. /h/ and /ŋ/ are separate phonemes in English, even though no minimal pair for them exists due to their complementary distribution.^[1]

Heng is also used in Bantu linguistics to indicate a voiced alveolar lateral fricative [ɮ].^[2] Heng was also historically used in the IPA for this sound, and later a compromise form between the two symbols ⟨⟩ was used.

Both U+A726 Ꜧ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER HENG and U+A727 ꜧ LATIN SMALL LETTER HENG are encoded in Unicode block Latin Extended-D; they were added with Unicode version 5.1 in April 2008.