The letter â (minuscule: ã) was used in the Latin orthographies of various, mostly Turkic languages, such as Azeri or the JaêÂÂalif orthography for Tatar. It was also included in the pinyin-based alphabets for Kazakh and Uyghur and in the 1928 Soviet Kurdish Latin alphabet. It usually represents a voiced velar fricative but is sometimes used for a voiced uvular fricative . All orthographies that used the letter were phased out, and it is not supported in all Latin fonts. It can still be seen in pre-1983 books published in the PeopleâÂÂs Republic of China.
Historically, it is derived from a handwritten form of the small Latin letter q around 1900. The majuscule is then based on the minuscule. Its use for stems from the linguistic tradition of representing such sounds (and similar ones) by q in Turkic languages and in transcriptions of Arabic or Persian (compare kaf and qaf).
In alphabetical order, it comes between G and H.
In Unicode, the majuscule â is encoded in the Latin Extended-B block at U+01A2 and the minuscule ã is encoded at U+01A3. The assigned names, "" and "" respectively, are acknowledged by the Unicode Consortium to be mistakes, as gha is unrelated to the letters O and I. The Unicode Consortium therefore has provided the character name aliases "" and "".
Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow features an episode purporting to be the story of a Soviet officer, Tchitcherine, dispatched to Kirghizstan to serve on a committee tasked with devising an alphabet for the Kyrgyz language. Tchitcherine's particular contribution is the invention of the letter â, which is thus perhaps the only obsolete letter of a Central Asian language that may be familiar to the non-specialist, English-reading public through a widely circulated novel.