N-apostrophe

N-apostrophe (’n, a letter ⟨n⟩ preceded by an apostrophe) is a digraph used in Afrikaans, a language spoken in South Africa and Namibia.

Grammar

The letter is the indefinite article of Afrikaans, and is pronounced as a schwa. The symbol itself came about as a contraction of its Dutch equivalent een meaning "one" (just as English an comes from Anglo-Saxon ān, also meaning "one").

Dit is ’n boom.
[dət əs ə buəm]
It is a tree.

In Afrikaans, ’n is never capitalised in standard texts. Instead, the first letter of the following word is capitalised.

’n Mens is hier.
A person is here.

An exception to this rule is in newspaper headlines, or sentences and phrases where all the letters are capitalised.

’N NASIONALE NOODTOESTAND
A NATIONAL EMERGENCY SITUATION

In computer systems

The Unicode standard recommends that a sequence of an apostrophe followed by n (’n) be used to encode this diagraph.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ A precomposed character form was included in Unicode for legacy ISO/IEC 6937 and CP853 document compatibility, as U+0149 ʼn LATIN SMALL LETTER N PRECEDED BY APOSTROPHE, but its use is deprecated. The use of deprecated characters such as ʼn is "strongly discouraged". However it continues to be used in the Afrikaans versions of Facebook and other publications, probably to avoid the tendency of auto-correction software (designed for English quotation marks) to turn a typed 'n (straight apostrophe, n) into ‘n (left single quotation mark, n), which is incorrect but common (rather than the correct form, ’n). The code point has been removed from some computer fonts, such as Charis SIL and Doulos SIL. The upper case, or majuscule form has never been included in any international keyboards and is not encoded as a precomposed character.

References

  1. ↑ The Unicode Standard, chapter 7
  2. ↑ Unicode: List of deprecated characters
  3. ↑ "UAX #44: Unicode Character Database".