Palatal hook

The palatal hook (◌̡) is a type of hook diacritic formerly used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent palatalized consonants. It is a small, leftwards-facing hook joined to the bottom-right side of a letter, and is distinguished from various other hooks indicating retroflexion, etc. It was withdrawn by the IPA in 1989, in favour of a superscript j following the consonant (i.e., ⟨ƫ⟩ becomes ⟨tʲ⟩).

The IPA recommended that esh ⟨ʃ⟩ and ezh ⟨ʒ⟩ not use the palatal hook, but instead get special curled symbols: ⟨ʆ⟩ and ⟨ʓ⟩. However, versions with the hook have also been used and are supported by Unicode.

Palatal hooks are also used in Lithuanian dialectology by the Lithuanian Phonetic Transcription System (or Lithuanian Phonetic Alphabet) and in the orthography of Nez Perce.