Sokuon

The sokuon (促音) is a Japanese symbol consisting of a small hiragana or katakana tsu. In less formal language it is called chiisai tsu (小さいつ) or chiisana tsu (小さなつ), meaning "little tsu". Compare to a full-sized tsu:

	Full-sized	Sokuon
Hiragana	つ	っ
Katakana	ツ	ッ

The sokuon is used for various purposes. The main use is to mark a geminate consonant, which is represented in rōmaji (romanized Japanese) by the doubling of the consonant.

Examples:

• Pocky, a Japanese snack food, is written in kana as ポッキー, which is

  ポ po

  ッ sokuon

  キ ki

  ー chōon

  In rōmaji, this is written pokkī, with the sokuon represented by the doubled k consonant.

• 待って (matte), the te form of the verb 待つ (matsu, "wait"), is composed of:

  待 ma (kanji)

  っ sokuon

  て te

  In the rōmaji rendering, matte, the sokuon is represented by the doubling of the t consonant.

The sokuon cannot appear at the beginning of a word, before a vowel kana (a, i, u, e, or o), or before kana that begin with the consonants n, m, r, w, or y. In addition, it does not appear before voiced consonants (g, z, d, or b), or before h, except in loanwords, or distorted speech, or dialects.

The sokuon is also used at the end of a sentence, to indicate a glottal stop (a sharp or cut-off articulation), which may indicate angry or surprised speech.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the sokuon is transcribed with either a colon-like length mark or a doubled consonant:

• kite (来て, "come") – /kite/
• kitte (切手, "postage stamp") – /kitːe/ or /kitte/
• asari (あさり, "clams") – /asaɽi/
• assari (あっさり, "easily") – /asːaɽi/ or /assaɽi/

In addition to Japanese, sokuon is used in Okinawan katakana orthographies. Ainu katakana uses a small ッ both for a final t-sound and to represent a sokuon.

Computer input

There are several methods of entering the sokuon using a computer or word-processor, such as xtu, ltu, ltsu, etc. Some systems, such as Mac OS X's Kotoeri and the Microsoft IME, automatically generate a sokuon if an applicable consonant letter is typed twice; for example tta generates った.

Other Representations

Braille:

⠂

See also

• Japanese phonology gives a detailed description of the sound system of Japanese.
• Gemination

External links

• Sokuon