Kra (letter)

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 [q] 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).