Sokuon

Japanese writing
Components
Kanji Stroke order Radicals Jōyō kanji list Kyōiku kanji Tōyō kanji Jinmeiyō kanji Hyōgai kanji
Kana Hiragana Hentaigana Katakana Man'yōgana Sōgana Gojūon
Typographic symbols Japanese punctuation Iteration mark
Uses
Syllabograms Furigana Okurigana Braille
Transliteration
Rōmaji Hepburn Kunrei-shiki / ISO 3602 Nihon-shiki JSL Wāpuro (keyboard input)
Cyrillization Polivanov system
v t e

The sokuon (促音) is a Japanese symbol in the form of a small hiragana or katakana tsu, as well as the various consonants represented by it. In less formal language, it is called chiisai tsu (小さいつ) or chiisana tsu (小さなつ), meaning "small tsu".^[1] It serves multiple purposes in Japanese writing.

In both hiragana and katakana, the sokuon appears as a tsu reduced in size:

The main use of the sokuon is to mark a geminate consonant,^[1] which is represented in most romanization systems by the doubling of the consonant, except that Hepburn romanization writes a geminate ch as tch. It denotes the gemination of the initial consonant of the symbol that follows it.

Examples:

The sokuon never appears at the beginning of a word or before a vowel (a, i, u, e, or o), and rarely appears before a syllable that begins with the consonants n, m, r, w, or y. (In words and loanwords that require geminating these consonants, ン (n), ム (mu), ル (ru), ウ (u), and イ (i) are usually used, respectively, instead of the sokuon.) In addition, it does not appear before voiced consonants (g, z, d, or b), or before h, except in loanwords, or distorted speech, or dialects. However, uncommon exceptions exist for stylistic reasons: For example, the Japanese name of the Pokémon species Cramorant is ウッウ, pronounced /uʔu/.^[2]

The sokuon is also used at the end of a sentence, to indicate a glottal stop (IPA [ʔ], a sharp or cut-off articulation),^[3] which may indicate angry or surprised speech. This pronunciation is also used for exceptions mentioned before (e.g., a sokuon before a vowel kana). There is no standard way of romanizing the sokuon that is at the end of a sentence. In English writing,^{[clarification needed]} this is often rendered as an em dash. Other conventions are to render it as t or as an apostrophe.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the sokuon is transcribed with either a colon-like length mark or a doubled consonant:

• kite (来て, "come") – /kite/
• kitte (切手, "postage stamp") – /kitːe/ or /kitte/
• asari (あさり, "clams") – /asari/
• assari (あっさり, "easily") – /asːari/ or /assari/

The sokuon represents a mora, thus for example the word Nippon (Japan) consists of only two syllables, but four morae: ni-p-po-n.^[4]

Major Japanese dictionaries list sokusei (促声, literally "rushed voice"; Simplified Chinese and shinjitai spelling), as a synonym for 促音 (sokuon, literally "rushed sound").^[5][6][7] This suggests an origin in Middle Chinese phonology, where sokusei (促聲, Traditional Chinese and kyūjitai spelling), also known as nisshō, nissei (入聲, literally "entering voice"), referred to a checked tone, or a syllable that ends in an unreleased plosive (see w:zh:促聲). 促聲 contrasts with 舒聲 (literally "leisurely voice") which is a syllable that ends in a vowel, semivowel, or nasal (see w:zh:舒聲).

The Meiji-era linguist Ōshima Masatake used the terms sokuon ("plosive") and hatsuon ("nasal") to describe ending consonants in Chinese (which he called Shinago (支那語), an outdated term used from the Edo period to after World War II^[5][6]). These sounds were classified as "labial" (唇內, shinnai), "lingual" (舌內, zetsunai) and "guttural" (喉內, kōnai). Sokuon, in particular, were classified as follows: [p̚] is the "labial plosive" (唇內促音), [t̚] is the "lingual plosive" (舌內促音), and [k̚] is the "guttural plosive" (喉內促音).^[8] Another of Ōshima's descriptions even more explicitly related the terms sokuon and hatsuon to the four tones of Middle Chinese.^[9]

Modern Japanese sokuon arose, in no small part, from consonant assimilation that occurred when an Early Middle Japanese approximation of a Chinese sokuon, such as pu (labial), t(i) (lingual) or ki/ku (guttural), was followed by an obstruent (plosive or fricative).^[10]

In addition to Japanese, sokuon is used in Okinawan katakana orthographies to represent glottal or ejective consonants. Ainu katakana uses a small ッ both for a final t-sound and to represent a sokuon (there is no ambiguity however, as gemination is allophonic with syllable-final t).

There are several methods of entering the sokuon using a computer or word-processor, such as xtu, ltu, ltsu, etc. Some systems, such as Kotoeri for macOS and the Microsoft IME, generate a sokuon if an applicable consonant letter is typed twice; for example tta generates った.

Braille:

• Computer encodings

• Fujihiko Kaneda, Rika Samidori (1989). Easy hiragana: first steps to reading and writing basic Japanese. Passport Books. pp. 74−78.

• Japanese phonology gives a detailed description of the sound system of Japanese.
• Gemination
• Chōonpu

Look up 促音, っ, or ッ in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.