Heng is a letter of the Latin alphabet, originating as a typographic ligature of h and à Â. It was originally used for a voiceless -like sound in Dania transcription of the Danish language (in Dania, it is considered a ligature of h and j).
Heng was used word-finally in early transcriptions of Mayan languages, where it may have represented a uvular fricative.
It is sometimes used to write Judeo-Tat.
Heng has been occasionally used by phonologists to represent a jocular phoneme in English, which includes both and as its allophones, to illustrate the limited usefulness of minimal pairs to distinguish phonemes. and are separate phonemes in English, even though no minimal pair for them exists due to their complementary distribution.
Heng is also used in Bantu linguistics to indicate a voiced alveolar lateral fricative . Heng was also historically used in the IPA for this sound, and later a compromise form between the two symbols was used.
Both and are encoded in Unicode block Latin Extended-D; they were added with Unicode version 5.1 in April 2008. The superscript is in Latin Extended-E, added in Unicode 7.0 in June 2014.
A variant form, , is encoded as part of the IPA <span lang="english" dir="rtl">Extensions</span> Block. It is used to represent the voiceless palatal-velar fricative in the International Phonetic Alphabet. is used as a superscript IPA letter.