Latin alpha (

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

: Ɑ,

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

: ɑ), script a, or single-story a is a letter of the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

based on a handwritten form of lowercase a, and which is commonly typeset with the

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

lowercase

alpha Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter ''aleph'' , whose name comes from the West Semitic word for ' ...

(α).

Usage

Although is normally just an

allograph In graphemics and typography, the term allograph is used of a glyph that is a design variant of a letter or other grapheme, such as a letter, a number, an ideograph, a punctuation mark or other typographic symbol. In graphemics, an obvious exa ...

of , there are instances in which the two letters are distinguished: * In the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

, represents an

open back unrounded vowel The open back unrounded vowel, or low back unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some Speech, spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is A ...

, while represents an

open front unrounded vowel The open front unrounded vowel, or low front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. It is one of the eight primary cardinal vowels, not directly intended to correspond to a vowel sound of a specific language b ...

. It has the shape of a script-a. * Also in the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages, usually represents an

, while represents an

. The former is used in the orthographies of several languages of Cameroon, including: ** Feʼfeʼ ** Mbembe ** Mbo (?): but not Akoose, though it does have phonemes /aa/ and /ɑɑ/; nor Bakaka. ** in some languages, the script-a form (also called literacy form) of the letter , with the lowercase much like the IPA , is used and should not be confused with the Latin alpha of the GACL; for example, in Muyang, the literacy represents an

open-mid central unrounded vowel The open-mid central unrounded vowel, or low-mid central unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is (formerly ). The IPA symbol is n ...

but it is not ; the Latin alpha is not used. *In typography, it is sometimes referred to as the single-story a, to distinguish it from double-story a. In Cameroon languages, lowercase is typeset as a lowercase Greek alpha to better differentiate it from the letter a in script or italic form. the capital is typically typeset as a large Latin script a. is used in the

Uralic Phonetic Alphabet Finno-Ugric transcription (FUT) or the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA) is a phonetic transcription or notational system used predominantly for the transcription and reconstruction of Uralic languages. It was first published in 1901 by Eemil Nesto ...

. is used in the

Teuthonista Teuthonista is a phonetic transcription system used predominantly for the transcription of High German languages, (High) German dialects. It is very similar to other Central European transcription systems from the early 20th century. The base cha ...

phonetic transcription system. Latin turned alpha is used in IPA is used in

Americanist phonetic notation Americanist phonetic notation, also known as the North American Phonetic Alphabet (NAPA), the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet or the American Phonetic Alphabet (APA), is a system of phonetic notation originally developed by European and American ...

Typography

Latin-a-and-Latin-alpha-and-Greek-alpha-in-different-fonts

Encoding and forms

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

, "Latin alpha" ( Latin lowercase alpha

) and "Latin script a" ( Latin uppercase script a

) are considered to be the same character, which has an uppercase and a lowercase form and is referred to as "Latin letter alpha".

References

A, Latin alpha Phonetic transcription symbols Vowel letters {{phonetics-stub

Usage

Typography

Encoding and forms

See also

References