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The lead=yes, colloquially , is a diacritic most often used in the Japanese kana syllabaries to indicate that the consonant of a mora should be pronounced voiced, for instance, on sounds that have undergone rendaku (sequential voicing).
The , , colloquially , is a diacritic used with kana for morae pronounced with or to indicate that they should instead be pronounced with .
Both the dakuten and handakuten glyphs are drawn identically in hiragana and katakana scripts. The combining characters are rarely used in full-width Japanese characters, as Unicode and all common multibyte Japanese encodings provide precomposed glyphs for all possible dakuten and handakuten character combinations in the standard hiragana and katakana ranges. However, combining characters are required in half-width kana, which does not provide any precomposed characters in order to fit within a single byte.
The similarity between the dakuten and (") is not a problem, as written Japanese uses Quotation mark (「」).
| か ka | が ga | |
| さ sa | ざ za | |
| た ta | だ da | |
| は ha | ば ba | ぱ pa |
| ら ra | ||
| わ wa |
(Yellow shading indicates non-standard use.)
Handakuten on ka, ki, ku, ke, ko (rendered as か゚, き゚, く゚, け゚, こ゚) represent the sound of ng in singing (), which is an allophone of in many dialects of Japanese. They are not used in normal Japanese writing, but may be used by linguists and in dictionaries (or to represent characters in fiction who speak that way). This is called extra="nasal muddy sound". Another rare application of handakuten is on the r-series, to mark them as explicitly l: ラ゚ , and so forth. This is only done in technical or pedantic contexts, as many Japanese speakers cannot tell the difference between r and l. Additionally, linguists sometimes use ウ゚ to represent in cases when speaker pronounces う at the beginning of a word as a moraic nasal.
In katakana only, the dakuten may also be added to the character ウ u and a small vowel character to create a sound, as in ヴァ va. However, a hiragana version of this character also exists, with somewhat sporadic compatibility across platforms (ゔ). As does not exist in Japanese, this usage applies only to some modern loanwords and remains relatively uncommon, and e.g. Venus is typically transliterated as ビーナス ( bīnasu) instead of ヴィーナス ( vīnasu). Japanese speakers, however, pronounce both the same, with or , an occasional allophone of intervocalic .
An even less common method is to add dakuten to the w-series, reviving the mostly obsolete characters for (ヰ) and (ヱ). is represented by using /u/, as above; becomes despite its normally being silent. Precomposed characters exist for this method as well ( ヷ ヸ ヴ ヹ ヺ), although most IMEs do not have a convenient way to enter them.
In Ainu texts, handakuten can be used with the katakana セ to make it a /t͡s/ sound, セ゚ ce t͡se (which is interchangeable with ツェ), and is used with small fu to represent a final p, ㇷ゚. In addition, handakuten can be combined with either katakana ツ or ト ( tsu and to) to make a tu̜ sound, ツ゚ or ト゚.
In Miyakoan, handakuten can be used with イ (normally i) to represent the vowel .
In informal writing, dakuten is occasionally used on vowels to indicate a shocked or strangled articulation; for example, on あ゙ or ゔ. Dakuten can also be occasionally used with ん (ん゙) to indicate a guttural hum, growl, or similar sound.
| Hiragana | ゝ | ゞ |
| Katakana | ヽ | ヾ |
Both signs are relatively rare, but can occasionally be found in personal names such as Misuzu (みすゞ) or brand names such as Isuzu (いすゞ). In these cases the pronunciation is identical to writing the kana out in full. A longer, multi-character iteration mark called the kunojiten (), only used in vertical writing, may also have a dakuten added ().
Voiced morae and semi-voiced morae do not have independent names in radiotelephony and are signified by the unvoiced name followed by "ni dakuten" or "ni handakuten".
| Yōon + Dakuten + Handakuten |
The earliest attested use of "muddy" diacritics was from the late ninth century. One of such diacritics was a superscript version of the radical 氵 from the "muddy" character 濁, as in 婆 ( ba rather than pa). The modern dakuten appears to have come from Chinese tone diacritics. In some documents, one dot marked pitch on a "clear sound," while two dots marked pitch on a "muddy sound." Another source was the Siddhaṃ nasality diacritic anusvāra through Buddhist sources. In Japanese writing, it was adapted into a dot placed at the top-right corner of a character to denote the "muddiness" or nasality of consonants, as well as of the nasalized vowels and adapted from the Chinese . The use of the anusvāra suggests prenasalization in early voiced consonants.
The handakuten is an innovation by Portuguese Jesuits, who first used it in the Rakuyōshū, to accurately transcribe the consonant and its lenited form , which had not been distinguished in domestic writing.
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