Ṣ (

minuscule Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...

: ṣ) is a letter of the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...

, formed from an S with the addition of a dot below the letter. Its uses include: * In the Alvarez/Hale orthography of the Tohono Oʼodham language to represent retroflex (Akimel O'odham and Saxton/Saxton use instead) * the

transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus '' trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or ...

of Indic languages to represent retroflex * the transcription of

Afro-Asiatic languages The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic su ...

(mostly

Semitic languages The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigrant and ...

) to represent an " emphatic s" as in Arabic ص (''

Ṣād Tsade (also spelled , , , , tzadi, sadhe, tzaddik) is the eighteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ṣādē , Hebrew ṣādi , Aramaic ṣāḏē , Syriac ṣāḏē ܨ, Ge'ez ṣädäy ጸ, and Arabic . Its oldest phonet ...

'') and as in the Hebrew צ (''

Tzadi Tsade (also spelled , , , , tzadi, sadhe, tzaddik) is the eighteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ṣādē , Hebrew ṣādi , Aramaic ṣāḏē , Syriac ṣāḏē ܨ, Ge'ez ṣädäy ጸ, and Arabic . Its oldest phonet ...

/Ṣādī'') spoken by the Jews of Yemen and North Africa * the orthography of Yoruba in

Nigeria Nigeria ( ), , ig, Naìjíríyà, yo, Nàìjíríà, pcm, Naijá , ff, Naajeeriya, kcg, Naijeriya officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf of G ...

to represent the

voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant A voiceless postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The International Phonetic Association uses the term ''voiceless postalveolar fricative'' only for the sound , but it also describes the voicele ...

(the

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

"sh" sound) In HTML these are Ṣ: Ṣ and ṣ: ṣ. The

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, whic ...

codepoints are U+1E62 for Ṣ and U+1E63 for ṣ in

Latin Extended Additional Latin Extended Additional is a Unicode block. The characters in this block are mostly precomposed combinations of Latin letters with one or more general diacritical marks. Ninety of the characters are used in the Vietnamese alphabet. There are a ...

range.

See also