Kra (letter)

ĸ in a Greenlandic-Danish dictionary from 1926

Kra (Κʻ / 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 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 in Greenlandic with Latin small letter q (and the associated Latin capital letter Q).

Notes

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
Related
Derivations Diacritics History ISO/IEC 646 List of letters Numerals Palaeography Punctuation Unicode