Wa (hiragana: ãÂÂ, katakana: ã¯) is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one mora. It represents and has origins in the character Ã¥ÂÂ. There is also a small ãÂÂ/ã®, that is used to write the morae /kwa/ and /gwa/ (ãÂÂãÂÂ, ãÂÂãÂÂ), which are almost obsolete in contemporary standard Japanese but still exist in the Ryukyuan languages. A few loanwords such as and contain this letter in Japanese. Katakana 㯠is also sometimes written with dakuten, ã·, to represent a sound in foreign words; however, most IMEs lack a convenient way to write this. It is far more common to represent the /va/ sound with the digraph ã´ã¡.
The kana 㯠(ha) is read as "wa" when it represents a particle.
The katakana , which is a wa with a dakuten ("voiced mark"), along with , was first used by the educator Fukuzawa Yukichi for transcribing English in 1860 in his English-Japanese dictionary, which featured such entries as (Hëvunu), (Venusu), (Rëvaru), etc. It is intended to represent a voiced labiodental fricative in foreign languages, but the actual pronunciation by Japanese speakers may be closer to a voiced bilabial fricative (see ).