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).^[1]

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. "Greenlandic alphabet" (PDF). Evertype. Retrieved 2009-06-23.