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Kra (uppercase: Kʼ, lowercase: ĸ) is a glyph formerly used to write the Kalaallisut language (also known as Greenlandic) of Greenland and is now only found in Inuttitut, a distinct Inuktitut dialect. It is visually similar to a Latin small capital letter K, a Greek letter Kappa: κ, or a Cyrillic small letter Ka: к.

It is used to denote the sound written as 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 (ĸ). If this is unavailable, q is substituted. The letter can be capitalized as Kʼ, but it is not encoded separately as a single letter because it is very similar to the Latin capital letter K followed by an apostrophe, preferably the modifier letter apostrophe, U+02BC ʼ MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE. However, this case mapping is not implemented in Unicode.

In 1973, a spelling reform replaced kra in Greenlandic with the Latin small letter q (and its capital form, with the Latin capital letter Q).

Notes

1. Everson, Michael (1998-09-12). "Responses to NCITS/L2 and Unicode Consortium comments on numerous proposals" (PDF).
2. Everson, Michael (1998-05-25). "Additional Latin characters for the UCS" (PDF).
3. Aliprand, Joan M. (2002-04-21). "Status of Mapping between Characters of ISO 5426-2 and ISO/IEC 10646-1 (UCS)" (PDF). The capital form of the letter kra can be encoded as the sequence U+004B LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K followed by U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE.
4. Everson, Michael. "Greenlandic alphabet" (PDF). Evertype. Retrieved 2009-06-23. Note that in the Greenlandic alphabet PDF from Evertype, the apostrophe-like symbol is represented by the symbol of U+2018, LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK. However Michael Everson uses the shape of the right single quotation mark or modifier letter apostrophe in other documents (e.g. Everson 1998).

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