Chōonpu

File:Taxis Zone in Tokyo 2008.jpg

The word (, Template:Gloss) written vertically with vertical chōonpu

The , also known as , , , or Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark by the Unicode Consortium, is a Japanese symbol that indicates a , or a long vowel of two morae in length. Its form is a horizontal or vertical line in the center of the text with the width of one kanji or kana character. It is written horizontally in horizontal text and vertically in vertical text (ー). The is usually used to indicate a long vowel sound in katakana writing, rarely in hiragana writing, and never in romanized Japanese. The is a distinct mark from the dash, and in most Japanese typefaces it can easily be distinguished. In horizontal writing it is similar in appearance to, but should not be confused with, the kanji character ("one").

The symbol is sometimes used with hiragana, for example in the signs of ramen restaurants, which are often written in hiragana, while the most standard orthography would be in katakana: . Canonically, however, hiragana never uses the ; instead, another vowel kana is used to express the long vowel. This applies in theory to onomatopoeia written in hiragana as well, but the use of the is generally tolerated and common: for .

The following table shows the usual hiragana equivalents used to form a long vowel, using the (the , , , , sequence) as an example.

Rōmaji	Hiragana	Katakana
()
()
()
( or )	or
( or )	or

may also be found after kanji as indication of phonetic, rather than phonemic, length of a vowel (as in "").

When rendering English words into katakana, the is often used to represent a syllable-final sequence of a vowel letter + r, which in English generally represents a long vowel if the syllable is stressed and a schwa if unstressed (in non-rhotic dialects such as Received Pronunciation; in rhotic dialects (such as General American) it may additionally be an R-colored vowel). For example, "or" is usually represented by a long (oo or ou) vowel, with the word "torch" becoming .

In addition to Japanese, are also used in Okinawan writing systems to indicate two morae. The Sakhalin dialect of Ainu also uses in its katakana writing for long vowels.

Digital encoding

In Unicode, the has the value Template:Unichar, which corresponds to JIS X 0208 kuten code point 01-28, encoded in Shift JIS as 815B. It is normally rendered fullwidth and with a glyph appropriate to the writing direction. The halfwidth compatibility form has the value Template:Unichar, which is converted to Shift JIS value B0.

Other representations

Braille:

See also

• Sokuon

External links

• Template:Sister-inline