N-apostrophe

N-apostrophe (ʼn) is a Unicode character used in Afrikaans, a language spoken in South Africa and Namibia. The code point (U+0149) is currently deprecated, and the Unicode standard recommends that a sequence of an apostrophe followed by n be used instead, as the use of deprecated characters such as ʼn is "strongly discouraged", despite being required for CP853 compatibility. In fact, it was removed from the Charis SIL and Doulos SIL fonts. It is however in quite general use in the Afrikaans versions of Facebook and other publications, probably to avoid the tendency of auto-correction (designed for English quotation marks) to turn a typed 'n (straight apostrophe, n) into ‘n (open single quote, n), which is incorrect but common.

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 ʼn boom.

[dət əs ə buəm]

It is a tree.

When ʼn comes before a vowel, it may be pronounced the same as English an. This pronunciation is not common at all and may be limited to older speakers – in general, the pronunciation mentioned above is used in all cases.

Dit is ʼn appel.

[dət əs n apəl] (also [-ɦn apəl])

This is an apple.

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

ʼn 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

Miscellaneous

The upper case, or majuscule form has never been included in any international keyboards. Therefore, it is decomposable by simply combining ʼ (U+02BC) and N. 〔ʼN〕

It is also a legacy compatibility character for the ISO/IEC 6937 and CP853 text encodings.

See also

• Afrikaans
• Afrikaans grammar