Ń

Ń (minuscule: ń) is a letter formed by putting an acute accent over the letter N. In the Belarusian Łacinka alphabet; the alphabets of Apache, Navajo, Polish, Karakalpak, Kashubian, Wymysorys and the Sorbian languages; and the romanization of Khmer and Macedonian, it represents /ɲ/,^[1] which is the same as Czech and Slovak ň, Serbo-Croatian and Albanian nj, Spanish and Galician ñ, Italian and French gn, Hungarian and Catalan ny, Latvian and Livonian ņ, and Portuguese nh. In Yoruba, it represents a syllabic /n/ with a high tone, and it often connects a pronoun to a verb: for example, when using the pronoun for "I" with the verb for "to eat", the resulting expression is mo ń jeun.

Usage

Polish

In Polish, it appears directly after ⟨n⟩ in the alphabet, but no Polish word begins with this letter, because it may not appear before a vowel (the letter may appear only before a consonant or in the word-final position).^[2] In the former case, a digraph ⟨ni⟩ is used to indicate /ɲ/. If the vowel following is /i/, only one ⟨i⟩ appears.

Examples

kwiecień (April)
słoń (elephant)
dłoń (hand)
hańba (disgrace)
słońce (sun)

Cantonese

It is used in the Yale romanisation of Cantonese when the nasal syllable /ŋ̩/ has a rising tone.

Lule Sami

Traditionally ⟨Ń⟩ has been used in Lule Sami to represent /ŋ/. However, in modern orthography, such as signage in Lule Sami by the Swedish government, ⟨Ŋ⟩ is used instead.

Kazakh

In Kazakh, it was proposed in 2018 to replace the Cyrillic Ң by this Latin alphabet and represents /ŋ/. The replacement suggestion was modified to Ŋ in 2019; and in 2021, it was suggested to replace it with Ñ.

Karakalpak

Ń/ń is the 19th letter of Karakalpak alphabet and represents /ŋ/.

Macedonian

Ń is used in Macedonian for the scientific romanisation of the Cyrillic letter ⟨њ⟩, representing /ɲ/, although the digraph ⟨nj⟩ is much more common. This, alongside ⟨ĺ⟩ and ⟨lj⟩, is one of the only two cases where there are two accepted Latin versions of a Cyrillic letter in the scientific romanisation, as per the orthography.

Computer use

HTML characters and Unicode code point numbers:

Ń: Ń or Ń – U+0143
ń: ń or ń – U+0144

In Unicode, Ń and ń are located the "Latin Extended-A" block.

References

^ Childs, G. Tucker (2014). "Chapter 2 Phonemic inventory". De Gruyter. Retrieved 2022-10-13.
^ G.E., Booij; J., Rubach; Letteren, Faculteit der (1990-01-01). "Syllable structure assignment in Polish". openaccess.leidenuniv.nl. Retrieved 2016-04-12.